Note: Though the document here is more detailed, it primarily consists
of material written in 1995 and 1996. It is suggested that readers
use the author's more recent paper on a related (though not identical)
topic, ``Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage,'' at

Americans tell their children, ``If you study hard, go to college, and
major in a professional field, you will have a reasonable chance for
a fine career.'' Yet such words have a hollow ring for Cindy, a
computer programmer who did all the right things and yet in 1994
found herself cast aside, unemployable, at the age of 35. (All
persons identified here by only a given name or only a surname have
had their names changed to protect their privacy.)

Cindy has been unable to find work as a computer programmer since
being laid off by a major firm in Silicon Valley. Yet the same
employers who reject her are filling their programming jobs with
foreign nationals. The employers, whose public relations experts
have heavily lobbied Congress against tightening of skills-based
immigration policies, say that Cindy's skills are outdated.
Sharon Gadberry, president of Transitions Management/Outplacement National
notes that job ads will specify ``five years of experience--they usually mean
no more than that.'' She explains that ``Companies are trying to screen out
the older workers.'' A major motivation appears to be that fresh graduates are
cheaper, with foreign nationals being the cheapest of all. A statistical
analysis performed by the author on the 1990 Census data revealed that average
salaries for foreign-born computer professionals in Silicon Valley were nearly
$7,000 lower than among natives of the same age and level of education.

The industry's claim that the issue is skills, not salary, is
unwarranted. Even Bill Gates of Microsoft says that general
programming talent is far more important than background with a
specific software technology. (See quote in the point-by-point
summary below.)

The issues here go directly to the middle class' growing feeling that
the American Dream is no longer in reach. According to a November
27, 1995 poll in the San Francisco Chronicle, a prime worry
among Californians today is that there will be no jobs for their
children when they grow up. How can we implore our computer science
students to study hard today, knowing that they too are liable to be
discarded a few years from now, like Cindy? Even the foreign
nationals are victims: Assuming they gain immigrant status, as is
typical, then five or 10 years from now, the same ``special skills''
for which they are hired today will be obsolete, and then these
people too will become victims of this throwaway-worker Ponzi scheme.

A quick summary of the situation is as follows.

The computer industry does not need to hire large numbers of
foreign nationals, either for the sake of quantity or quality:

There is a labor surplus in the field. (Sections 5.1,
5.2.1, 10 and 14.)

The vast majority of major technical advances made in the industry
have been made by U.S. natives, not immigrants. (Section 12.)

The large number of foreign nationals being hired is due
to these main factors:

Some unscrupulous employers wish to save on salary costs, and
foreign nationals, in exchange for a green card, are willing to work
for lower salaries. (Section 6.2.)

Some sincere but misguided employers have placed an unwarranted
emphasis on hiring people with very highly specific skill sets, thus
creating an artificial labor ``shortage.'' (Section 8.1.)

Some sincere employers wish to save on salary costs, by hiring
mainly young new college graduates instead of mid-career people. When they
run out of young domestic workers, they turn to young foreign workers,
instead of to domestic mid-career people. (Section 10.)

Ethnic social networks have led to some company divisions, or
in the case of small firms entire companies, hiring almost exclusively
from a certain ethnic group, such as Chinese or Indian. (Section
8.4.)

In 1995 and early 1996, when Congress was considering legislation
which would have tightened the laws under which U.S. employers can
hire foreign nationals and sponsor them for immigration, industry
lobbyists used a number of arguments in opposition. Following is
a summary of those arguments, and our responses to
them.

footnote: Senator Alan Simpson, author of legislation to reform
skills-based immigration, eventually withdrew the legislation,
complaining that ``I was working with the business community...to
address their concerns, [but] each time we resolved one, they became
more creative, more novel. [The lobbyists] distorted everything we
were up to, everything.''

Industry claim: Immigrants are vital to the American computer
industry's ability to maintain its technological edge.

Our response: The vast majority of technological advances in the
computer field have been made by U.S. natives. This can be seen
in rough form, for example, in the fact that of the 56 awards given
for industrial innovation by the Association for Computing Machinery,
only one recipient has been an immigrant. Of 115 U.S. recipients of
computer-related awards given by the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers, only nine of the recipients have been
immigrants. We should definitely encourage and facilitate the
immigration of those who have extraordinary talent, but most of the
immigrants in the industry do not fall into this category.

Industry claim: Pages and pages of computer job ads in major
newspapers prove that there is a shortage of programmers with the
skills employers need. That is why employers turn to hiring foreign
nationals.

Our response: Employers are over-defining these jobs, insisting that
applicants have skills in X and Y and Z and W and so on. But what
really counts in programming jobs is general programming talent, not
experience with specific software skills. Even Bill Gates has
described Microsoft hiring criteria thusly: ``We're not looking for
any specific knowledge because things change so fast, and it's easy to
learn stuff. You've got to have an excitement about software, a
certain intelligence...It's not the specific knowledge that
counts.'' Studies show that programmers can become productive in a
new software technology in a month or so (this is confirmed by my own
personal experience, in 25 years of keeping up with technological
change in the industry). Thus employers are (some deliberately,
some unwittingly) creating an
artificial labor ``shortage.''

Industry claim: The shortage is so acute that we have taken to
placing job adds on highway buildboards, even banners from airplanes
flying over Silicon Valley.

As mentioned above, there is no shortage of professionals in the field.
Employers receive huge numbers of resume's but only a small proportion
of them result in interviews. Microsoft, for instance, only hires 2%
of its applicants for software positions.

footnote: Tacoma News
Tribune, May 13, 1997.

This is hardly a picture of desperation. If
there were a real shortage, employers simply could not afford to be so
picky.

Industry claim: The industry needs to hire recent
graduates, shunting aside many mid-career professionals, as the recent
graduates are the only ones who have up-to-date skills.

Our response: As noted above, what counts is general programming
talent, not highly-specific skills. New skills can be learned
quickly. Many employers like the recent graduates not for their
skills, but rather because they are cheaper, with foreign nationals
being even cheaper still. And whether sincere or not, industry
employers who follow such a policy are operating a Ponzi scheme, since
software technologies change so fast: If one hires a young graduate
because he/she has specific skills, he/she will be cast aside in a few
years when those same skills become obsolete. The comments by
employers regarding new graduates are tantamount to an admission of
rampant age discrimination, as is the point made by employment agent
Gadberry above. This will produce less and less incentive for young
people to enter the field in the future.

Industry claim: If a mid-career programmer cannot find a job,
it is his/her own fault, for not keeping his/her skills up to date.

Take for example the C++ programming language, which is a requirement
for many new jobs these days. C++ is an extension of the C language
which most programmers use, and is easily learned. A programmer could
take a course in C++ at a local community college, or just learn it
on his/her own PC at home. But no employer would hire on this basis;
except for new graduates, employers insist on actual work experience
in the given skill set.

Industry claim: The computer industry pays immigrants the
same as it does natives.

Our response: Sun Microsystems, for instance, has heavily lobbied
Congress against reform, saying that it needs to scour the world in
order to hire the best and the brightest, but it seems more interested
in hiring the cheapest. It has even publicly boasted that it hired 50
programmers in Russia ``at bargain prices.'' A statistical analysis
performed by the author on the 1990 Census data revealed that average
salaries for foreign-born computer professionals in Silicon Valley were
nearly $7,000 lower than among natives of the same age and level of
education. Even greater disparities, approaching 30% were found for
engineering in general by UCLA Asian American Studies professor Paul
Ong--a prominent immigrant advocate--who commented, ``Companies took
advantage of immigrants.'' Furthermore, by concentrating on hiring
young recent graduates, even employers who give equal wages to domestic
and immigrant workers are saving money, since the younger workers are
cheaper; when they run out of new domestic graduates, they hire new
foreign graduates, ignoring the experienced domestic workers.

Industry claim: Many jobs in the industry pay very high salaries,
sometimes even paying bonuses to induce workers to accept job offers.
This demonstrates that the hiring of foreign nationals is not having an
adverse impact on wages for domestic workers.

Our response: As noted earlier, employers are over-defining job
requirements, with ads like ``Must have five years of experience
writing C++ code for TCP/IP applications on SPARC platforms.'' The
pool of programmers satisfying such conditions is of course small,
thus raising salaries for those within that narrow pool. Yet as the
Gates quote above illustrates, such pools are
artificially
narrow, since such tight job requirements are unwarranted. And as
William Schroeder, CEO of Diamond Multimedia Systems has pointed out,
these artificially high salaries then further increase incentives for
employers to hire cheaper foreign nationals. Overall, engineering
salaries have decreased relative to inflation, according to the the
American Association of Engineering Societies.

Our response: People still must make a living, and thus must settle
for taking whatever kind of job they can find. Many domestic computer
programmers are
underemployed, say working in computer
customer interface jobs instead of programming, or in jobs which are
completely unrelated to computers. Also, a number of them are forced
to do temp work when they cannot find permanent jobs. Thus
unemployment statistics are not very meaningful.
Industry claim: Half of the Ph.D.'s in computer science at
American universities are going to foreign students, who are then
hired by American employers after graduation and put into research
positions.

Our response: Experts agree that America is overproducing Ph.D.'s,
both foreign and domestic. These doctorate holders may well find jobs,
but the jobs do not require Ph.D. training. Bill Gates of Microsoft
does not even have a Bachelor's degree, much less a Ph.D. I have no
formal training in computer science (my Ph.D. is in mathematics), and
yet I have been both a software developer in industry and a computer
science researcher in academia.

Our response: The employers admit that most of the foreign nationals
they hires are foreign students who have recently graduated from
American universities. Typically the hiring is done in the middle of
a semester, so the employer needs to wait several months before the
foreign national starts work. Thus the industry is contradicting its
own claim.

Industry claim: Not enough domestic students are studying
science and mathematics in primary and secondary school, and thus
we have a shortage of trained engineers and computer programmers.

Our response: It is true that the number of new graduates in these
fields has fluctuated, but we have not had a shortage. SoftPac, of Austin,
Texas, found that during 1990-1993--the period of lowest production
of new graduates in these fields--there were 525,000 workers trained
in engineering and programming and available for work but there were
only 378,000 job openings. That surplus did lead to a decline in
college in enrollment in these fields, but that has now reversed;
enrollment in computer science was up 40% nationwide in 1996. By
the way, while mathematics is used in engineering, it is not used
in computer programming.

Industry claim: Given its success, the industry must know best
whom to hire. Natural market forces will result in the best people
being hired.

Our response: Since most employers use the same hiring policies, a
poor policy does not give any of them a competitive disadvantage.
Indeed, market theory seems to fail in the computer industry.
Studies have shown that programmers who are twice as productive
are paid only 10% more. Intel leads the processor-chip market by
far, yet its chip is widely regarded as poorly designed, as noted in Bill
Gates' famous remark that the Intel chip is ``brain damaged.''

Industry claim: True, there have been some abuses of laws
allowing employers to hire foreign workers, but the offenders here
have been small, unknown ``body shops,'' not the big companies in the
industry.

Our response: Sun Microsystems, which we noted above had boasted
of hiring Russian programmers ``at bargain prices,'' is one of the
most prominent companies in the industry. Hewlett-Packard, another
giant in the industry, admitted under oath in court that the
cheap programmers it had imported from India were of inferior
quality. General Dynamics, a prominent engineering company, hired
engineers from Britain whose agents described as being attractive
due to the ``indentured'' (i.e. exploitable) nature of their visa
status.

Industry claim: The industry already has strong disincentives
against hiring foreign nationals, as the legal costs to obtain the
visas are so high.

Our response: One can get approval from the Department of Labor to
hire a foreign national on an H-1B visa for simply the price of the
phone call made when one faxes in the application. More work is
required for INS transactions, but economies of scale make this cost
very low for the larger employers. Many of the smaller employers
require the employee to pay the legal costs him/herself.

Industry claim: Company X employs a large number of
immigrant engineers from country Y. This proves the need
for immigrants.

Our response: This is a negative, not the positive point implied
in the claim. It reflects networked hiring among an immigrant
ethnicity, with the result that natives (as well as immigrants
of the ``wrong'' ethnicity) are not being given access to these
jobs.

Industry claim: Company Z was founded by an immigrant.
This proves the need for immigrants in the industry.

Our response: The fact that a company was founded by an immigrant
does not imply that if not for this immigrant, this sector of the
industry would not exist. Again, we should facilitate the immigration
of engineers of extraordinary talent, such as An Wang, founder of Wang
Laboratories. But generally the immigrant entrepreneurs have not
played pivotal roles in the industry's technological development.
Furthermore, if a foreign national wishes to start a company in the
U.S., he/she can do so via an investor's immigrant visa; it is not
necessary to have a large quota in the skilled-immigrant visa
categories for this purpose.

Dr. Norman Matloff is a Professor of Computer Science at the
University of California at Davis, where he formerly was a
faculty member in the Division of Statistics. In addition, he is
Graduate Admissions Coordinator for Computer Science at UCD. Dr.
Matloff is also a former software developer in the Silicon Valley,
and his wife continues to work there as a software engineer.

His areas of research specialization include multiprocessor hardware
systems, database software security, and Chinese-language software.
He is a former appointed member of IFIP Working Group 11.3, an
international committee concerned with database software security,
and is the author of a Prentice-Hall textbook on Intel assembly
language programming.

Professor Matloff was a former Chair of the Affirmative Action
Committee at UC Davis, and has long been active in work supporting
minorities, particularly African-Americans and Latino-Americans,
in programs such as MEP, MORE and SURPRISE.

He has been close to immigrant communities all his life. He spent
part of his formative years in predominantly-Latino East Lost Angeles,
and his father was an immigrant from Lithuania. Professor Matloff is
particularly close to the Chinese immigrant community:

His wife is an immigrant from Hong Kong; he speaks Chinese (Cantonese
and Mandarin), and he and his wife are raising their daughter to be
bilingual; many of their social friends are Chinese immigrants,
including many who are Silicon Valley engineers; the television sets
in his house are tuned to Chinese-language stations as often as to
English ones, and he reads the Chinese-language press; he has
extensive experience as a volunteer worker in San Francisco's
Chinatown, and has long been active in efforts to combat
discrimination against Chinese-Americans (see, for example, his
article in Asian Week, July 14, 1995, exposing the
racially-related firing of a Chinese immigrant engineer). Dr. Lester
Lee, a prominent Chinese-American and former member of the University
of California Board of Regents, appointed Dr. Matloff to the Committee
for Rational Relations with China in 1995.

Dr. Matloff's 20-year immersion in the Chinese immigrant community
is important to this report, because the vast majority of
immigrant engineers in the Silicon Valley are of Chinese
ethnicity. The preponderance of Chinese examples in this report
stems from these considerations.

As I wish to focus on the computer industry and particularly the
Silicon Valley, I will use the term ``the computer industry'' to
mean companies whose primary products consist of computer software
and hardware. This would exclude, for example, banks, insurance
companies, hospitals and so on, even though they do produce software
for internal use.

The growth of the industry has been mostly in software rather than
hardware. For instance, of H-1B work-visa application listings for a
period in 1994 in Texas, there were 139 software positions, with
titles like Software Engineer and Programmer, compared to only 30 for
positions titled Electrical Engineer (some of the EE positions may
also be in software). Thus, most graduates of programs in computer
science, computer engineering and electrical engineering who work in
technical positions in the computer industry are developing software,
not hardware. Graduates of all three of these curricula tend to work
in the same jobs. In most cases, it would be impossible to guess a
person's educational background knowing the type of work he/she is
doing in the industry. For this reason, when discussing university
curricula with names like Computer Science, Computer Engineering and
Electrical Engineering, I will simply use the term ``computer
science'' to include them all.

Again, the vast majority of technical jobs in the industry are
in software. Thus this report will for the most part focus on that
realm.

Programming jobs in the computer industry differ from those in banks,
insurance companies and so on. Instead of the latter's paradigm of
job titles and clearly-separated functions such as System Analyst
(design) and Programmer (mundane coding), in the computer industry the
standard job title for a programmer is Software Engineer, and a job
will usually include both design and coding responsibilities.

footnote: See
for example Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful
Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages
People, by Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby, Free Press, 1995,
p.83. See also Japanese Software Factories, by Michael Cusumano,
Oxford University Press, 1991, p.111: ``The accepted process [at the
Digital Equipment Corporation, a prominent American company headquartered
in Massachusetts] called not for divisions of labor by levels of skill,
but for software development by multiskilled engineers who did their
own design and coding.''

Again, a programmer would have such a
title regardless of whether he/she has a degree in engineering.
For these and other reasons, analysts of the industry should
avoid inferring much significance from job titles.

Similarly, claims by industry spokespeople in the Fall of 1995
that there are two kinds of programming--``research'' programming
and ``ordinary'' programming--have no basis in reality.

Ron Unz, a software entrepreneur who also has active political
interests

footnote: Unz ran in the 1994 Republican primary election for
California governor. Though previously unknown, he still was able to
attract 34% of the vote against Pete Wilson, the incumbent and
eventual victor in the general election. Unz is also credited for
convincing Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett, two nationally-prominent
Republicans, to take strong pro-immigration stances in 1994.

, has
made his pro-immigration stance the centerpiece of his political
strategy. He notes that more than 30 percent of the Silicon Valley's
computer professionals are foreign-born, and says the Silicon Valley's
sponsorship of foreign nationals for immigration is crucial to the
industry's technical edge. (See the San Jose Mercury News,
October 27, 1995, and various articles by Unz, such as in the
National Review.)

Yet even though Unz's 30% figure is correct,

footnote: As verified by
the PUMS Census data.

his conclusion--that those immigrants in the
Silicon Valley are actually needed--represents a leap in logic. To
say that because a certain percentage of an industry is of a certain
group hardly justifies a claim that the industry ``depends'' on that
particular group. For instance, 40 percent of our nation's small
motels happen to be run by immigrants from India; yet no one would
leap to the conclusion that without Indians there would be no motels.
Instead, the hiring of foreign nationals arose in the following
context.

Back in the 1980s, during the infancy of the modern computer
industry, there was a high-tech labor shortage. As word of this
shortage reached Asia, foreign students flocked to American graduate
schools.

footnote: In the early years, most of the foreign students
were from Taiwan, but they were later joined by students from China,
Hong Kong and India.

For example, at that time foreign students
typically comprised 70 percent or more of the enrollments in computer
science graduate programs at University of California and California
State University campuses. The students hoped that after graduation
they would be hired by employers in the American computer industry--and
most importantly, sponsored by the employers for green cards.

Universities in the students' home countries were treated as
steppingstones for eventual immigration to the U.S. One clever
Chinese ditty sung in Taiwan, referring to National Taiwan
University (NTU), succinctly described the plan as (roughly):

Come, come, come,
Come to NTU!
Go, go, go,
Go to the U.S. too!

No previous training in computers was required. Ms. Tan, for example,
had an economics degree from NTU. Her lack of computer background
was no obstacle, as many American schools offer quick computer
science Master's degrees which are especially tailored to students
from other fields. For example, Professor Daniel Lewis, Chair of the
Computer Engineering Department at Santa Clara University (a small
but vibrant Jesuit university in the heart of the Silicon Valley)
says that about half of the foreign students in their Master's
program have (both in the past and currently) come from
noncomputer-related undergraduate backgrounds. (Interview
with the author, May 16, 1994.) After Tan graduated, an American
computer company hired her and sponsored her for immigration.

Many employers found hiring foreign nationals attractive because they
were willing to work for lower pay, in exchange for being sponsored
for a green card. Moreover, the presence of the foreign students in
American universities alleviated employers of the need to promote computer
studies among domestic students at those same schools. (Recall that
American industry did successfully promote engineering studies among
domestic students in order to staff the ``Space Race'' of the 1960s.)

At the time, the hiring of Ms. Tan described in the last subsection
appeared to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to be in the
national interest. Ms. Tan, after all, seemed to be helping the go-go
American computer industry cope with an acute labor shortage. Yet
though part of this shortage may have been real, a significant
portion was only perceived, an industry overreaction. In the
excitement of the computer revolution, numerous ``startup'' companies
were formed, each one hoping to become the next Apple Computer-style
Cinderella story of the Silicon Valley. As a result, too many
companies were formed, and the industry overhired.

The inevitable effect of this was, beginning in the late 1980s,
widespread bankruptcy for the smaller companies and mass layoffs for
many larger companies. There now as a labor surplus, not a
shortage. In other words, during the 1980s too many employment-based
green cards were granted to foreign computer professionals. Instead
of being necessary for the industry's technical edge, as claimed
by Unz, these workers are swelling today's labor surplus.

One cannot pinpoint the year in which the labor surplus began, but it
clearly occurred somewhere in the latter half of the decade. This was
clear from the bankruptcies and layoffs, as well as from statistics.
An author and specialist in the field, Janet Ruhl, believes that the
supply of university graduates caught up to and surpassed demand by
1987, stating that ``By 1987 an estimated 60,000 graduates were
competing for some 25,000 open positions.'' (The Programmer's
Survival Guide, Prentice-Hall, 1989.) Edward Yourdon, a prominent
author on software development management techniques, thinks that even
in 1984 there were more new university graduates in the field than
there were job openings. (The Decline and Fall of the American
Programmer, Prentice-Hall, 1993, p.12.)

The labor surplus which began in the late 1980s has continued to grow
since that time. For example, the aforementioned Ms. Tan began in 1994
to dread threatened layoffs in the company for which she works, a
well-known Silicon Valley firm. To the company's credit, those
layoffs have yet to materialize, but many programmers have little
work to do, and in 1995 the firm's CEO sent e-mail to all employees,
stating that layoffs are still a distinct possibility.
Note that as pointed out by the electrical engineering trade journal
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum
(August 1993 issue), this industry change was mainly a consequence of
the maturing of the industry, rather than a reflection of the
economic recession of 1991-1992. (Note, by the way, that the industry
hired foreign nationals in large numbers during the recession too.)

Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, SoftPac estimates
that the software industry needed approximately 40,000 new workers in
1994. This is less than the 51,000 new computer science graduates our
universities produced. Yet the number of foreign computer
programmers granted work visas in 1994 exceeded 30,000. SoftPac also
found that between 1990 and 1993, U.S. colleges and universities
awarded two bachelors degrees in engineering for every engineering
job opening created through net replacement.

SoftPac cautions that the value of these figures should be limited to
their indication of a general trend of overproduction of computer
scientists and engineers. The exact numbers themselves should not be
dwelt upon, because exact analyses of employment in this area are
impossible. For example, there is extensive overlap between the
``programmer'' and ``engineer'' categories used in many high-skill labor
data sets. Many graduates holding computer science degrees later work
in jobs categorized as engineering, such as ``software engineer''
(again, this title is the standard one for most programmers in the
Silicon Valley) or ``member of the technical staff,'' while many of
those in jobs categorized as programming hold engineering degrees, such
as computer engineering and electrical engineering. One way to avoid
these crossover problems is to look at the combined
programmer/engineering numbers, which indicate that during 1990-1993
there were 525,000 workers trained in engineering and programming and
available for work but there were only 378,000 job openings.

We noted earlier that Edward Yourdon, a prominent author on software
development management techniques, thinks that even in 1984--the time
at which the industry was undergoing its fastest growth in history,
either in the past or since that time--there were more new university
graduates in the field than there were job openings.

In addition, SoftPac notes that ``the Digital Equipment Corporation
has cut over 20,000 U.S. jobs since 1990, yet during the same time
applied for over 1100 H-1B visas.''

During this time, many new computer science graduates found it
difficult to get work, often taking several months, and even then
they tended to be hired in nontechnical or semitechnical positions,
becoming software testers, software customer service representatives,
and computer system administrators, while the foreign nationals were
hired for the technical work.

The number of full-time computer jobs in the Silicon Valley decreased
markedly between 1990 and 1994, with many jobs being converted to
``temps,'' according to Michael Peter Smith of the University of
California at Davis' Applied Behavioral Sciences Department.
(Presentation to the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, November
16, 1995.)
Meanwhile 20,000 programmers were laid off from the defense
industry. With only a modest degree of retraining, these proven
software engineers could be making valuable contributions
in the computer industry. Instead, the Los Angeles Times
reported in 1993 that most were working in nontechnical jobs, even as
security guards and pizza deliverers.
Yet computer industry employers continued to hire foreign nationals
and sponsor them for immigration. At the same time, new domestic
graduates were often shunted into nontechnical positions such as
marketing,

footnote: This can be seen, though somewhat indirectly, in
for example: San Jose Mercury News, March 16, 1995; San
Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 1993; San Francisco Chronicle,
December 27, 1994; and San Jose Mercury News, May 17, 1995.
This was also noted in the interview with Daniel Lewis of Santa
Clara University, and of course in interviews with my own students.

while the foreign nationals, typically new graduates themselves, were
hired to do the technical work.

5.2.1 Trends in Enrollment in University Computer Science
Curricula

In March 1997, the Information Technology Association of America
(ITAA) released a report titled Help Wanted: The IT Workforce
at the Dawn of a New Century. ITAA is a consortium of computer
industry employers, and its president, Harris Miller, was a major
lobbyist opposing the employer-based sections of the immigration-reform
bills introduced in Congress in 1995. The report's research was done
by Stuart Anderson, whose analsis of salaries we critique in Section
6.2.

A major thrust of the report is a claim that insufficiently many
new graduates in computer science and engineering are being produced
for our national needs. ITAA bases this claim on a decline in the
number of computer science graduates, from 42,000 in 1986 to 24,000
in 1994.

As I have shown above, at no time since 1980 has there been a
shortage of people with degrees in computer science and engineering.
The basic problem is that employers are not willing to hire people who
do not have background in the latest technologies. The employers'
unwillingness in this regard is unwarranted, as I explain in detail in
Section 8.1, but my point in the context of the ITAA report is
that there is no shortage of ``bodies.'' Indeed, even the ITAA report
recognizes this, quoting a December 2, 1996 Information Week article
saying that ``The competition for today's hottest skills is that
tough'' (my emphasis).

However, given the wide circulation of the ITAA report, its point
about national enrollment in computer science curricula should be
addressed.

Here are a few key points:

Throughout its report, ITAA cites statistics on jobs in the
``IT [information technology] industry'' and compares them to
the numbers of computer science graduates. Yet many of those jobs
are, by the report's only admission, for ``technicians,'' which
typically are done by people without a college degree.

It is true that, at least in the early 1990s, undergraduate
enrollment in computer science dropped. Yet it is interesting that even
industry representatives (including ITAA) interviewed by Business
Week (March 10, 1997) blamed this decline in interest in computer
science among university students partly on ``a glut of programmers in
the mid-1980s.''

footnote: As I have explained earlier, I would correct
this slightly, saying that the glut occurred in the late 1980s.

Students do tend to choose their majors on the basis of the perceived
job market in the field. Without the large numbers of foreign nationals
hired in the 1980s, this glut would not have existed.

Apparently in response to numerous newspaper articles in 1996
reporting a shortage in the computer field, national computer science
enrollment in the 1996-1997 academic year was up 40%, according to the
Computing Research Association.

footnote: This information, in the March
1997 issue of the Computing Research News, was conveyed to ITAA's
Harris Miller and Tony Vickers by a Computing Research News
official when ITAA distributed a preliminary draft of their report at a
roundtable discussion organized by the Stanford Computer Industry
Project on February 19, 1997. Unfortunately, it was not incorporated
into the final report.

Even in the early-1990s years of nationally declining computer
science enrollments, California enrollments were increasing. For
example, here are total enrollment figures (sum of the enrollments
in all courses) in the Department of Computer Science at UC Davis:

Though the national numbers of new Bachelor's degrees in
engineering did fall about 15% from 1987 to 1989, the rate of
production has been essentially constant since 1989, at about 65,000 per
year. (Engineers: A Quarterly Bulletin on Careers in the
Profession, January 1997.)

Note also that ITAA attributes the decline in computer science
enrollment to an alleged disinterest among American children in
mathematics. This is plainly false. One can hardly claim, for
instance, that interest in mathematics among American declined
50% in eight years--and then suddenly increased by 40% in one
year.

And much more importantly, computer programming does not use
mathematics. Flip through any book on programming (C++, Java, etc.) at
your local bookstore; you will not see any equations or mathematical
graphs.

5.3.1 There Is No Lack of ``Bodies''

Numerous newspaper and magazine articles in 1996 reported a severe
high-tech labor shortage. And yet as before, there actually is no
shortage of workers with computer science and engineering degrees.
Instead, the problem is that employers have become very picky about whom
they hire. As the Electronic Engineering Times put it (June 24,
1996), ``Engineering graduates are plentiful in general, but some
companies are starving for specialists.'' This was similar to the quote
we cited earlier from Information Week (``Stretched to the
Limit,''December 2, 1996):

Federal Express Corp., lauded for its many technical innovations,
still can't attract enough skilled IT workers. The competition for
today's hottest skills is that tough.

(Here and below, emphasis is mine.)

As I will explain in detail in Section 8.1, this emphasis on
specialists is unwarranted, but the point is that there is no shortage
of ``bodies,'' i.e. no shortage of people with computer science and
engineering degrees.

Another statement in the same article illustrates this particularly well:

Nearly all of the 300 CIOs surveyed by Information Week in August
said they have problems finding employees with specific skills--even
though only about half planned to enlarge their IS staffs this year.

(The latter half of this statement is also of interest, given the claims
of a ``shortage.'')

Similarly, the claims that the ``shortage'' is leading to high salaries,
signing bonuses and other perks, again is limited only to those with
specified skills. Here is a typical example (``Revolutionary Times,''
Computerworld, March 31, 1997):

``We're competing with every other [Boston] area company for people with
client/server, Unix, Java, C++, Visual Basic and Windows tools skills,''
says Paula Merageas, a human resources representative at Thomson
Financial Services Corp.

5.3.2 The Current Job Market

The job market in 1996 can be described as follows:

Prospects for many new graduates improved markedly, apparently in
large part due to adverse publicity the industry received after Congress
and the media focused attention on the widespread hiring of foreign
nationals.

Other new graduates were still being ignored or shunted into
nontechnical jobs.

Mid-career computer professionals, such as our ``Cindy'' mentioned
early, still found it difficult to get full-time work in the industry.

The details follow.

A sharp change occurred in late 1995, in the form of a sudden increase in
on-campus recruiting of new graduates. Employers now flocked to campuses
that they had not visited in years. For example, a Microsoft college
relations officer told me that Microsoft had decided to greatly
expand its list of campuses to visit; among the new schools added to
their list was my university, UC Davis (UCD).

Indeed, our UCD Career and Internship Center was suddenly deluged with
calls from employers requesting interview slots for graduating seniors
in the computer fields. Newspaper articles then began to appear
about a sudden ``boom'' in job offers for the new graduates. (See
for example the Washington Post, June 3, 1996.) Those students
who received job offers got better offers than graduates had in the
recent past--solid technical positions at good salaries.

Yet this effect on new graduates was selective. Students told me that
they were not allowed to sign up for interview slots with many employers
if their skills were not an exact match for the employers' requirements.
As will be discussed in detail later in this report (Section 7.4),
employer overemphasis on specific skills is unreasonable and is one of
the major underlying causes of underemployment and unemployment in the
computer fields. And though those getting new jobs do tend to be hired
for technical positions, many students were still being hired for
software testing and other semitechnical and nontechnical jobs.
Moreover, many schools were not included in the sudden ``boom.'' Take
for example San Francisco State University (SFSU). When I first
interviewed SFSU Computer Science Department Chair Gerald Eisner on
November 14, 1995, he had confirmed a statement made to me by an SFSU
student that out of hundreds of computer companies in the San Francisco
Bay Area, only two (Oracle and Sybase) go to SFSU to recruit new
graduates. When I re-interviewed him in June 1996, he stated that the
number of computer industry employers recruiting at SFSU had not
increased substantially.

footnote: Dr. Eisner did mention that employers
will sometimes phone him for suggestions of students to contact for
individual interviews, and that such phone calls had increased since I
had talked to him in November 1995.

It is a safe bet that if these
companies were not recruiting at some schools in their own back yard,
they were not doing so in Kansas City or Tallahassee either. Indeed, in
December 1996 with the Chair of the Computer Science Department of a
major cornbelt-region university told me that only a small fraction of his
department's new graduates were being hired by the computer industry
(the rest did get hired, but in computer applications fields such as
banking); by the way, willingness to relocate was not an issue, since
most of the graduates did take jobs out of state.

Another aspect is that the graduates who were now benefitting from the
computer industry's new focus on them tended to be those who had had
co-ops, internships or summer jobs in the industry during their
undergraduate careers. The employers are indeed correct in giving
preference to such students in hiring for permanent positions, but
there are not enough co-ops, etc. to meet the high demand. Yet
foreign students have ready access to such jobs.
It must be kept in mind that this shift in employer attention to new
graduates was just that--a shift, rather than an across-the-board
increase in hiring. In other words, all indications are that there
was no corresponding increase in job prospects for mid-career
programmers and in fact such prospects appear to have eroded further.
This shift appears to be due partly to the adverse publicity the
industry received in 1995 over their hiring of foreign workers, and
partly an acceleration of the trend, already in progress, to hire new
graduates over experienced workers because the new graduates are
cheaper. For instance, the Electronic Engineering Times, June
10, 1996, reported that on a survey by the National Association of
Colleges and Employers which found a major trend toward hiring of new
graduates instead of experienced workers, noting that ```The lower
salaries [of new graduates compared to experienced workers] are
probably playing a significant role in sustaining the market for new
graduates,' said University of Iowa researcher Sara Rynes.''
Again, the shift toward the new graduates made things even worse for
the mid-career professionals (except those who were lucky enough to
have the ``right'' skills set), who had already been finding it
difficult to get work in the industry. For example:

Microsoft receives approximately 120,000 resume's per year
for software positions, but hires only about 2,300 of the
applicants. (Tacoma News Tribune, May 13, 1997.)

Andrew Gaynor, a Silicon
Valley employment agent, stated in an interview with me (July 1, 1996)
that anyone with 10 or more years of experience without
currently-``hot'' skills ``is at a complete disconnect'' in finding
work.

Our running example Cindy was still unable to
find a full-time programming job.

Several of Ms. Tan's coworkers stated on November 12, 1995 that
they believed that if the threatened layoffs in their firm were to
occur, they would have great difficulty finding a job. Several had in
fact tried to do so, and had either come up empty-handed or had only
managed to land semitechnical positions such as customer support.

Ms. Yee, a software engineer with 10+ years of experience, does
have a job but when in January 1996 she looked for another job with a
shorter commute, a number of employers told her that they are
concentrating on hiring people with three years of experience or less.

A January 15, 1996 San Francisco Chronicle article
reported a turnout of 1,900 applicants to a job fair held by a
medium-sized Silicon Valley firm.

A training program for laid-off engineers attracted 15
times more applicants than the program could accept (San Jose
Mercury News, January 9, 1996).

Susan Miller, a computer industry employment agent said (June
26, 1996) that the situation remained bad for the former defense
industry programmers as well: ``They are usually shunned by the
industry. I get a tremendous number of resume's from them but I can't
place them.''

A recruiter from SurfSoft, a Silicon Valley employment agency,
told me in July 1996 that he had not placed any mid-career people at
all in recent months.

We will further explore the adverse impacts on mid-career professionals
in detail in Section 10.

There is no doubt that the sudden increase in campus recruiting by
industry employers was in part an employer reaction to the adverse
publicity the industry had gotten in 1995 over the hiring of foreign
nationals, particularly stemming from the introduction of an
immigration-reform bill by Senator Alan Simpson which would have
substantially curtailed the ability of employers to hire foreign
workers and sponsor them for immigration, and from magazine and
newspaper articles critical of the industry. The suddenness of the
change rules out technical or economic factors, as does the lack of
corresponding beneficial effect on mid-career workers.

footnote: This
is not to say that more gradual technical/economic factors had not
been taking place. Internet-related firms, for instance, were growing
rapidly, but that growth had started a year or two earlier, well
before the surge in hiring of new graduates.

Shortly after my article on this matter appeared in the National
Review (October 8, 1995), our UC Davis Career and Internship Center
was deluged with calls from employers who wanted to book interview
slots for graduating seniors. A student overheard a staff member
receiving such a call, and replying, ``We have been flooded with requests
ever since that professor's article came out.'' The employers booked
more slots than our seniors could fill, and then angrily complained
to the Center staff, threatening to have a reduced recruiting
presence at UCD in the future. As mentioned earlier, many of these
companies, such as Microsoft, had not been recruiting at UCD in
previous years. Top officials at companies such as Microsoft and
Intel told me that they had been quite aware of my National
Review piece.

The increase in campus recruiting was a very positive step, but the
fact remained that job prospects were still poor for the mid-career
professionals. And the same students who were getting jobs as
new graduates will find identical problems 10 years from now,
with employers rejecting them for jobs because their
skills are now considered outdated, just as is occurring to today's
mid-career workers. The industry's response to criticism merely
shifted some of the problems, not solved them. The core problem was
that we do have a labor surplus, and that the hiring of foreign
nationals and sponsoring them for immigration is greatly exacerbating
that surplus.
Not only is there a surplus of trained workers in the computer field,
but there is also a goldmine of other talent which is being ignored.
In software work what really counts is good, solid analytical
ability, not formal degrees in computer science. As detailed below,
many of the computer industry stars have no formal training in
computer science. The tens of thousands of unemployed or
underemployed Ph.D.'s in physics, mathematics and so on could be put
to excellent use in the computer industry. Indeed, some have
managed to find work in the computer field, though not necessarily in
the computer industry. But for the most part the industry is missing
an excellent opportunity to hire some top minds, if only
employers were to place less obsessive emphasis on paper credentials.

Lou, for instance, is a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering but in the
engineering job from which he was laid off he wrote award-winning
engineering software for use on Silicon Graphics computers. After
that job ended, he tried without success to get a job at Silicon
Graphics, which produces software similar to what he had written.

The press tends to portray competition for jobs due to immigration
as a conflict between non-Caucasians and the Caucasian majority.
However, it is widely recognized among specialists in immigration
(including many immigrant advocates) that minority groups tend to
be especially impacted.

Since many in the computer field are Asian-Americans (whether natives
or naturalized citizens), that group comprises a major class of
victims of current policy. Cindy, the mid-career computer professional
who finds it difficult to get programming work, is Chinese-American.
Lou, the former defense engineer cited above who cannot find
technical work, is also Chinese-American, as are Ms. Tan (the one
afraid of being laid off) and Ms. Yee (whom employers told she had
too much work experience).

The harm current policy imposes on Asian-Americans becomes even more
clear in light of the situation at San Francisco State University,
which has an especially large Asian-American enrollment. As stated
above, out of literally hundreds of computer companies in the San
Francisco Bay Area, only two (Oracle and Sybase) go to San Francisco
State University to recruit new graduates. Without such easy access
to hiring of foreign nationals, more companies would be forced to
recruit at these schools, giving Asian-Americans and others more and
better job opportunities.

The route taken by Ms. Tan and thousands of others from Asia is typical:
First the person comes to the U.S. on an F-1 student visa, and
then after graduation seeks a job with an American employer who then
sponsors him/her for a green card.

During the interim period during which the employee waits in the
immigration queue (which depends on how many nationals from
that particular country are in the queue), he/she either works
under Practical Training status (an extension of the F-1 student
visa) or under an H-1B temporary work visa.

This situation, which I will refer to as the ``university steppingstone''
route, is in contrast to that in which an American employer directly
imports a worker from a foreign country under an H-1B temporary visa.
(It should be noted that for many companies the H-1B visa is ``temporary''
in name only, according to Intel's chair Gordon Moore.

footnote:
San Jose Mercury News, November 13, 1995.

It too is a steppingstone
to sponsorship for permanent residence by the employer.)

The ``direct import'' situation has received considerable press in
recent years, but it should be noted that most foreign-born
professionals working in the computer industry have used the
``university steppingstone'' route. While both routes tend to
produce problems in terms of displacement of American workers,
it is important to understand this distinction.

The author's primary interest is in those who follow the university
steppingstone route, and most of the statements made in this report
concern that group.

On the surface, it would appear that there are some disincentives
against employers hiring foreign nationals. The law requires documentation
that no American worker could be found to fill the job in question,
and the services of an attorney are generally used, thus creating an
expense.

The actuality, though, is that there are no serious disincentives.
When a software manager wants to hire a foreign national, he typically
will not be involved in the visa process at all; the process will be
handled by the company's personnel department. Thus there are no
disincentives for the software manager.

The personnel department doesn't find the process difficult either.
The documentation that it must submit to the Department of Labor (DOL)
is not given careful scrutiny. SoftPac of Austin, Texas notes that:

The Houston Chronicle analyzed three years of foreign labor
applications that employers submitted to the Labor Department and
found that Texas employers convinced the department 99% of the time
that there were no qualified U.S. workers to take the jobs. According
to a 1991 report by the Labor Department's inspector general, the
vast majority of immigrants are permitted to enter the U.S. without
considering their impact on the American job market. Companies will
tailor requirements to such an extent that only the foreigner they wish
to hire can meet them. A Department of Labor official told the Houston
Chronicle that ``the Labor Department doesn't have the personnel to check
the accuracy of employer's statements to support their decision not to
hire a U.S. worker.'' Additionally, the Board of Alien Labor Certification
Appeals often overrules regional offices when they contend that U.S.
applicants are qualified. According to the officer, ``When an employer
says no, its no.''

In May of 1996, the federal Department of Labor released a report,
The Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Programs: The
System is Broken and Needs to be Fixed.

A press release on the report summarized, ``[W]hile DOL is doing all it
can within its authority, the foreign labor programs we audited do not
protect U.S. workers' jobs or wages from foreign labor because neither
program meets its legislative intent. Moreover, DOL' s role under the
current program design amounts to little more than a paper shuffle for
the PLC program and a rubber stamping of applications for the LCA
program. As a result, annual expenditures of approximately $50 million
for DOL's s foreign programs do little to `add value' to the process. If
such programs are to continue, we believe changes must be made to ensure
1hat U.S. workers' jobs are protected and that their wage levels are not
eroded by foreign labor. However, DOL should be removed from the process
unless a more meaningful role is defined.''

Significantly, the DOL report also found that although employers are
in theory supposed to make a widespread search for domestic workers
before offering a job to a foreign national, this requirement is not
working either. In cases in which state employment agencies referred
domestic workers to jobs for which employers had applied to hire a
foreign national, only 0.08% of the domestic workers--less than one
in one thousand--were hired.

The expenses for an attorney do not present a disincentive
either.

footnote: Some of this is described in David North's
Soothing the Establishment: the Impact of Foreign-Born Scientists and
Engineers on America, (University Press of America, 1995, p.52.

The
only expense involved with obtaining approval from the Department of
Labor for an H-1B visa is the price of the telephone call needed to
fax in the application. Obtaining approval for INS transactions is
more involved, but the process has become so routine that the expenses
are minimal these days. And often the employer will ask the foreign
national to pay the legal expenses him/herself.

Mr. Ivanov immigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1980. In 1994 he
had a rather startling experience when he interviewed for a
position with a software firm in New York.

First, Ivanov was surprised to find that almost all of the company's
technical staff were from either Russia or India. He was even more
taken aback when the employer, expressing interest in hiring Ivanov,
began to explain how the company would sponsor Ivanov for immigration.
When Ivanov replied that he was already a naturalized U.S. citizen,
he was told that the company was no longer interested in him.

Ms. Yang came to the U.S. as a student from China. After graduation,
she was hired and sponsored for immigration by a Silicon Valley
computer firm. She then noticed that the company rejected any job
applicant who already had citizen or permanent resident status. The
company works its programmers 10 hours per day, with no overtime pay
or compensating time off, at low salaries.

Many computer professionals have similar stories to tell, claiming
that employers hire foreign nationals out of a desire for cheap,
compliant labor.

Employers who wish to offer positions to foreign nationals are in
theory supposed to demonstrate to the Department of Labor (DOL) that
they are paying the prevailing wage. However, due to the wide
variation in salaries in the computer field, it is difficult for
non-computer specialists in the DOL to determine whether an offered
salary is too low.

There can be no doubt that salary is a major issue with employers.
Prominent software development expert Edward Yourdon points out
that ``...it takes very little capital to get started [in the
software business]; indeed, the largest cost is the labor involved,
which is why the issue of salaries is so important.'' (The
Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, Yourdon Press,
Prentice-Hall, 1996, p.4.)

One of the first questions asked in an interview is the salary level
the applicant expects. Indeed, this will typically be asked in a
telephone pre-interview, with the answer being a major factor in
determining whether the applicant will be invited to interview in
person. Thus even employers who do not necessarily plan at the outset
to hire a foreign national may end up doing so simply because the
latter is the lowest bidder. Indeed, a high-salaried applicant is
likely to not even get an interview. Clearly, then, salary is a major
employer concern.
Note too that this also means that the low initial salary a foreign
national is willing to take in exchange for a green card then tends to
propagate even after he/she receives the card. Each time this
person applies for a job in the future, the employer will first ask
what his/her current salary is. UCLA Asian-American Studies professor
Paul Ong found that it takes the immigrants 20 to 25 years to catch
up. (The State of Asian Pacific America, Paul Ong (ed.),
LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian
American Studies Center, 1994, p.179.)
Note that even if all employers were to offer the same salaries
to foreign nationals as to domestic workers, the simple law of
supply and demand would imply that overall wages would be lower
than what they would have been without the presence of the foreign
nationals; a labor surplus in a given profession reduces salaries.

It is important to note that hiring managers may hire foreign
nationals to save costs even without any explicit directive from upper
management to do so. Hiring managers know that they will be rebuked
if they hire too many people at higher salary levels. Thus they have
considerable incentives to hire foreign nationals who will accept
lower salaries, as well as incentives to hire new or recent graduates,
turning to new foreign graduates when they run out of new domestic
graduates (and shunning domestic mid-career people).

7.2.1 Multivariate Studies Based on Census Data

To assess the role of salary in the hiring of foreign nationals, I
ran a statistical regression analysis on the 1990 Census
data.

footnote: 5% PUMS sample.

The data consisted of all
professionals who listed their occupations as Programmer, Computer
Scientist or Electrical Engineer,

footnote: As noted earlier, all
three of these occupational categories tend to be associated with the
same kind of work. However, different individuals may enter
different occupations when completing the Census form, even if they
do the same work. For example, someone with an electrical
engineering degree may list his/her occupation as Electrical
Engineering even though he/she is doing programming, merely because
of his/her educational background.

and whose workplace was in or
near the Silicon Valley. (This consisted of Santa Clara, Alameda and
San Mateo Counties.)

An individual was excluded if he/she worked less than 48 weeks in 1989,
or had less than a Bachelor's degree. In all, the data set consisted
of 1,551 individuals. The predictor variables were Age (a proxy for
years of experience), Foreign-Born status (1 if foreign-born, 0 if
native), and Education (1 for Bachelor's, 2 for Master's, 3 for Ph.D.).

Note that in this manner we were adjusting for both years of experience
and education. Exclusion of the Education variable, for instance, would
have resulted in a misleading analysis, as the higher number of holders
of graduate degrees among the foreign-born (recall the ``university
steppingstone'' phenomenon) would make it look like they are better-paid
than they actually are.

On the other hand, we would not want to count as ``foreign-born''
people who immigrated via nonemployment means when they were
children, and thus have no interest in taking lower salaries in
exchange for a green card that they do not need. Accordingly,
I only included immigrants who entered the U.S. in the five years
prior to the date of the Census.

The resulting regression equation was:

Salary = 657 Age - 6744 Foreign Born + 6135 Education + 19187

In other words, if one fixes years of experience and level of education,
the immigrant engineers were on the average paid nearly $7,000 less
in salary than the natives. This differential is nearly 15% of
the $50,000 average salary found in the data set.

Moreover, presumably there are a number of sincere employers in the
mix who do pay immigrants wages equal to those of natives. Thus
the average differential among the employers who pay lower wages
to immigrants would be much higher than the $6,744 figure.

Regression models comprise the standard tool for analysis of salary
data, but to get additional perspective I subsequently ran another
analysis on this same data set, in this case using a direct
tabulation rather than applying a regression model. This tabulation
was again limited to the Silicon Valley, but this time I added the
further constraints that the worker has a Master's degree (and does
not have a Ph.D.), and that the worker is at most 32 years old. For
the foreign-born, I included the worker if his entry to the U.S. had
been no more than eight years earlier. I then simply computed mean
salaries for all native and all foreign-born. The results were:

native: $51,480

foreign-born: $42,845

UCLA Asian American Studies professor Paul Ong, together with Evelyn
Blumenberg, performed detailed studies on the 1990 Census data. After
adjusting for a host of factors such as experience, education, English
proficiency, and so on, they found that ``Recent immigrants in
engineering earn about one-third less than their U.S.-born
[Asian-American] counterparts.'' They note that other researchers have
found that ``Foreign scientists and engineers may be willing to accept
lower salaries in order to obtain full-time employment in the U.S., a
prerequisite for permanent residency.''

footnote: The State of Asian
Pacific America, Paul Ong (ed.), LEAP Asian Pacific American Public
Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1994,
p.179-180. The article is reprinted in New American Destinies, D.
Hamamoto and R. Torres (ed.), Routledge, 1997.

In the Electronic Engineering Times, July 18, 1994, Ong comments
on his study, saying ``Companies took advantage of
immigrants.''

footnote: Ong and Blumenberg also discuss the possible
effect of another factor, concerning whether the engineer has an
American education. This is discussed below in connected with the
Stuart Anderson analyses.

7.2.2 Problems with Other Studies

Some other studies comparing immigrant and native salaries in science
and engineering have been published or referenced since congressional
attention was brought to the issue in 1995.

For instance, the July 1995 issue of Engineers, a publication
of the Engineering Workforce Commission of the American Association
of Engineering Societies (AAES, which includes IEEE), stated (p.5):
``[Base salaries in] software engineering companies showed especially
severe declines, [because that job sector] may be flooded with prospective
applicants.'' Their data for salaries (in constant dollars, i.e.
adjusted for inflation) show a steady downward trend in salaries
from 1986 to 1995, with an erosion of about 10% during that period.

On the other hand, Stuart Anderson of the pro-immigration Cato Institute
conducted a study for Empower America (EA), titled Employment-Based
Immigration and High Technology, in which Anderson uses unpublished
National Science Foundation data to assert that the immigrants are
actually paid more on average than the natives.

The fact is that both of these studies must be viewed with the utmost
of caution, because they do not correct for important variables. The
reader is urged to keep in mind that the analyses of salary issues
can be very misleading unless proper controls are made for variables
such as:

geography

type of work

occupational field

type of employer (e.g. industrial vs. academic)

type of study (e.g. Census vs. self-respondent survey)

level of education

age

length of time in the U.S.

Neither the AAES nor the EA study controlled for geographical variations
in salary, which is a major factor. A 1995 publication by High
Technology Careers, titled Future Outlook, shows salary variations
of 15-20% among the four states Arizona, California, Colorado and Texas,
and in certain subfields the variation is even greater than that. This
is an especially important point for immigrant programmers and engineers,
as they tend to seek jobs in high-cost-of-living areas such as the
Silicon Valley, which have accordingly higher salaries.

Neither study controlled for type of employer, again a major factor.
Proportionally fewer immigrant Ph.D.'s take jobs in academia, which
are lower-paid than jobs in industry.

Furthermore, self-respondent surveys are quite unreliable for this kind
of analysis, especially because many immigrant engineers come from cultures
in which survey response rates are low. There may well be a greater
propensity for low-salaried immigrant engineers to not bother returning a
survey form. Both the AAES and EA studies were based on self-respondent
surveys.

The length of time in the U.S. is a major variable. Programmers who are
foreign nationals on H-1B work visas and are being sponsored for green
cards by their employers are essentially immobile, unable to switch
jobs, because they do not want to start the green-card process all over
again with a new employer. Thus their employers can exploit them,
giving them fewer and smaller raises in salary than what comparable
U.S. citizen/permanent resident workers get.

The type of work is another crucial variable. The employers themselves
admit that the H-1Bs are hired because they have certain ``hot skills,''
say the Java programm language. Java commands a premium in salary. But
an employer can hire an H-1B with Java skills for a salary which is low
for Java people but higher than those of ördinary" programmers. This
creates a major distortion under which it seems like the H-1Bs are being
paid well, when in fact they are being cheated.

The EA study did at least adjust for level of education and age, but it
lumped together science and engineering salaries, a major flaw since
engineering salaries tend to be substantially higher.

footnote: The
study by Ong and Blumenberg mentioned above found differences of
approximately 15%.

Since the immigrants in technical fields are
overwhelmingly concentrated in engineering rather than
science,

footnote: See for example the North reference cited below,
p.64.

this again is a major problem.

Though David North's Soothing the Establishment: the Impact of
Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers on America, (University Press
of America, 1995) has quite a bit of valuable information, its
wage analyses tend to suffer from the same problems cited above.

Stuart Anderson, author of the EA report, subsequently published an
article, ``The Wage and Employment Impact of Immigrant Scientists and
Engineers in High Technology,'' in the Fall 1996 issue of
International Educator. This magazine is published by the National
Association of Foreign Student Advisers (NAFSA), which had heavily
lobbied against 1995-1996 congressional proposals aimed at curbing the
use of American university graduate programs as steppingstones to
immigration.

footnote: See Section 14.2 for more information on
NAFSA lobbying activities.

Anderson's article contained largely the
same material as in his EA report, but had a significant update in
that it addressed the work of Ong and Blumenberg which I have cited
above.

footnote: Anderson had taken a look at this article after I
had urged him to do so at a conference on immigration held at
Stanford University in October 1996.

Here is Anderson's response:

Anderson cites the Ong/Blumenberg finding from Census data that
foreign-born Asian engineers in the U.S. had wages approximatley 33%
lower than their American-born counterparts. However, he then notes
that Ong and Blumenberg point to another study, this one on data from
the Survey on Natural and Social Scientists and Engineers, which found
that ``...those with a foreign education earn about 10 percent less than
those with a U.S. education. There are no differences in wages between
the U.S.-born and foreign-born employees with a U.S. education after
controlling for other factors'' (quote from the Ong and Blumenberg
reference cited above).

Anderson then concludes from this that ``what Ong and Blumenberg found
[that the foreign-born workers were paid 33% less than the natives]
does not have to do with `cheap' immigrant labor but with how U.S.
employers evaluate the relative importance of U.S. education.'' But of
course this conclusion does not follow at all--even if all the
foreign-born workers were lacking a U.S. education (which is not the
case at all), the 10% salary differential due to this lack certainly
cannot explain the 33% overall salary gap found by Ong and
Blumenberg.

footnote: Anderson later sent me a letter, offering the
explanation that this discrepancy is due to the fact that the 10%
figure is for all foreign-born professionals while the 33% is only for
the recently-arrived ones. In essence, he is arguing that among
recently-arrived foreign scientists and engineers, a U.S. education
commands a 33% premium in salary. But employers do not pay such drastic
salary differentials based on schools. Moreover, even the 10% figure
above is misleading, as explained below.

In my own analysis of the 1990 Census data, shown above, I studied
Master's degree holders in Silicon Valley under age 32, including
immigrants who had been in the U.S. eight years or less. Based on
Silicon Valley patterns, we may safely assume that nearly all of the
foreign-born in this sample have their Master's degrees from American
schools. Yet the natives made on average 19% more than their immigrant
counterparts.

Note by the way that Anderson, in advancing this argument that the
foreign-born engineers have ``33% inferior'' schooling, is also
claiming that those engineers are also ``33% inferior'' in quality,
which certainly is not helping his argument that we should import
large numbers of foreign engineers.

And note again that Ong himself
described the results of his studies by saying ``Companies took
advantage of immigrants.''

By the way, even that 10% figure is inflated. The reason for this is
that the statistical regression analysis, in examing those with an
American education, is picking up many foreign-born workers who
immigrated as children with their families. These workers of course
already have their immigration status settled, and thus are not subject
to exploitation by employers--unlike those who come to the U.S. under
foreign-student visas hoping that employers will later sponsor them for
green cards, and who are thus willing to work for lower wages in
exchange for the green cards. The ``American Education'' variable, by
mixing these two different groups, is producing an overestimate of the
effect. Instead of measuring the value of an American education, this
variable is measuring the value of having a green card.

Another way in which salary data can be misleading is that
due to an overemphasis on paper credentials, there has been an
increase in salaries for some types of experienced programmers.
By insisting on hiring, say, a programmer who has experience with
TCP/IP network protocols, C++ programming and Motif windows--and
again, we will show later why this is unreasonable and indeed harmful
to the industry--an employer is looking at such a narrow pool that
he of course must pay a premium salary. (This in turn leads to
further hiring of cheaper foreign nationals.)

An article in the San Jose Mercury News on February 16, 1997
described this multilithic nature of salaries in the industry in the
case of temporary programmers:

It should be noted that salary data would not reflect other adverse
impacts of foreign-national workers on domestic workers. As discussed
in Section 5.1, a major recent trend in the industry has been a
shift toward hiring new or recent graduates instead of established
people, because the younger people have lower salary levels. An
employer with this motivation would turn to hiring cheaper young foreign
nationals when he runs out of cheaper young domestic workers to
hire--instead of turning to more expensive mid-career people. In
this case the mid-career people's employability is reduced by the
presence of the foreign nationals, even if the employer pays
the young foreign nationals identical salaries to those paid to the
young domestic workers.

Possibly the most misleading type of study is that which analyses
unemployment rates. Such rates understate the problem, because those
who are laid off must, after all, take some kind of job. Often the
jobs which laid-off engineers must settle for carry a reduction in
salary, and involve responsibilities which do not utilize the person's
talents. Laid-off programmers, for example, must often take jobs in
program testing instead of software development, or in interfacing
with customers. Cindy, the laid-off programmer described in our
opening section, finally had to take a job completely out of her
field, doing noncomputer work for an investment firm. Thus
analyses of unemployment rates among programmers and engineers carry
essentially no meaning.

During the Fall of 1995, many industry spokespeople denied that low
salaries were the factor in the hiring of foreign nationals, claiming
that the foreign workers are simply more talented. Sun Microsystems
vice president Ken Alvarez claimed that then-pending congressional
legislation ``is going to kill us,'' by blocking Sun's ability to hire
``the best talent in the world.'' Yet Sun itself has boasted of, for
example, hiring 50 programmers in Russia at ``bargain prices,''
according to the Los Angeles Times (November 15, 1993, and also
July 15, 1996).

Falcon International, a General Dynamics subcontractor, even brazenly
referred to the foreign-national employees as being highly attractive
because they are ``indentured'' to the employer.

footnote: This
statement was made in Falcon's document, ``Falcon International's
Proposal to Supply International Labor for General Dynamics's Convair
Division,'' August 2, 1989. This document was used as an exhibit in
the Department of Justice's prosecution of General Dynamics, and was
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by SoftPac.

Joseph Costello, CEO of Cadence Design Systems, a leading CAD software
firm, has stated that when Cadence was considering setting up a
development branch in India, a bullet item in a slide presentation
on the proposal listed ``salary savings'' as an inducement for the
move.

Costello
quickly added that he had rejected cost as a criterion. However,
though he and two other Silicon Valley CEOs on the panel (Dado
Banatao of S3 and Phil White of Informix) claimed that their only
criterion for setting up foreign development branches was the
existence of ``pools of talent,'' it certainly is no coincidence
that the sites they chose were all in low-wage countries.

Ms. Hasbrouck told the MT group ``after hiring the foreign student,
delay the immigration paper work process, because when they get their
green card we lose them to companies like Sun Microsystems and
Silicon Graphics, they pay them about 30% more.''

Salary is indeed a factor in the hiring of foreign nationals. This
was even conceded by William Schroeder, chief executive officer at
Diamond Multimedia Systems. According to the Wall Street Journal
(October 9, 1995), ``Mr. Schroeder says that since skilled people can
demand a premium salary in the U.S., it is understandable that
employers will seek lower-cost alternatives abroad.''

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who has been lobbying Congress to retain the
ability to hire foreign nationals, is notorious for hating to pay high
salaries. (See Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful
Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages
People, by Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby, Free Press,
1995, and the Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1996.) In the
past, he solved that problem by paying low salaries while offering
stock options to compensate, but now that the Microsoft stock price
has stabilized, this is not a solution. Wall Street Journal
reporter G. Pascal Zachary, writing in the industry online trade
journal Upside (``The Once and Future Microsoft.'' April 1995),
says that

These raw [Microsoft] recruits are grousing about the company's thin stock
packages and woeful starting salaries, which are as much as a quarter
less than those offered by competitors. The low salaries are a
perverse consequence of Microsoft's obscenely high profits; it earns
an extraordinary 25 cents on every dollar in revenue. But as
Microsoft's stock price stagnates and the chances of parlaying options
into multimillions vastly diminishes, Gates is increasingly meeting
his profit targets on the backs of his workers.

It is possible that this is the reason Gates now is so vociferous in
demanding that Congress not reform laws under which foreign nationals
are hired.

Gates is also famous for making his programmers work 80 hours a week
or more (with no overtime pay), making his effective salary scale half of
those of ``normal'' companies. According to Cusumano, in a recent
year Microsoft made only one offer to 50 new Massachusetts Institute
of Technology graduates who interviewed with the firm. In spite of
Gates' previous claim that his main criterion in hiring is ``smart
people'' (a criterion which presumably most MIT graduates which
satisfy), it would seem that what he really wants is people who
convince the interviewers they are willing to work 80 hours per week
without overtime pay.

TJ Rodgers, the CEO of chip manufacturer Cypress Semiconductor, has
been quite outspoken in opposing tightening up the laws under which
skilled foreign nationals can be hired. In early 1996, he stated that
he has 230 positions which he could not fill, and thus must resort
to hiring foreign nationals. In response to Rodgers' statement,
I received the following e-mail message. The sender has a BSEE
and was just finishing his MSCS at the time he sent the message
(March 1996). He was interviewing for jobs, and had several excellent
offers in hand, mostly for hardware-design positions. He made the
following remark about Cypress:

``T.J. Rodgers' company Cypress did not bother to interview me after
my friend at Cypress submitted my resume'. If Rodgers claims he can't
fill 230 positions then I don't have any sympathy for his company.
If hiring managers don't even bother to contact applicants--then it
is the company's unasssertive recruiting that causes positions to
stay open--not the status of the market. The federal government has
the courtesy to respond to applicants in writing, unlike Cypress.
The general impression is that applicants can only assume from Cypress
is nonresponsive or nonhiring. After learning how my MSEE friend is
compensated at Cypress, any market-wise person should be unsurprised
that Cypress has difficulty filling positions.''

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle (March 7, 1996),
Rodgers even claimed that he cannot find people to fill even his
positions as administrative assistants, at high salaries. ``Our
choice would be to hire everyone from San Jose [where Cypress is
located], but they are simply not available.'' This of course is
disingenuous; if Rodgers is indeed paying high salaries, he would
be flooded with application for jobs as administrative assistants
if he were to cast his net wider than San Jose.

The employer's sponsorship of a foreign national for a visa (either
an immigrant visa or a temporary work visa) provides real leverage
over the employee. For instance, as mentioned earlier, Falcon
International, a General Dynamics subcontractor, even brazenly
referred to the foreign-national employees as being highly attractive
because they are ``indentured'' to the employer.

Falcon was referring to foreign nationals holding H-1B temporary
work visas. For those who are sponsored by the employer for green
cards, i.e. immigrant status, the situation is similar; the
worker's ``indentured'' status continues during the time the employee
waits in the immigration queue, a process lasting as long as three
years.

Industry claims of getting ``the best and the brightest''--as opposed
to the cheapest--ring hollow in light of an incident recounted by
Mary Dumont, a Palo Alto attorney representing Californians for
Population Stabilization in a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard's hiring
of Indian engineers via the Tata Corporation. Dumont describes the
judge's questioning of a Hewlett-Packard representative. When the
judge asked about the quality of the imported Indian workers relative
to natives from, say, the nearby University of California at Berkeley,
the Hewlett-Packard representative conceded that the UC graduates were
better.

Current policy on skilled immigration amounts to a monetary subsidy
given to employers by the federal government, in several senses:

Many employers pay lower wages to foreign nationals.

Many employers save on salary costs by hiring young new (or
recent) graduates. When they run out of young domestic workers, they
turn to the young foreign workers.

Hiring foreign workers saves employers the costs of retraining
employees. When the employers run out of domestic workers having a
specific skill set, they hire foreign nationals with these skills.

The employers themselves demanded this subsidy, when they pressured
Congress to expand yearly quotas for skilled immigrants in the 1990
Immigration Act. This of course is richly ironic, given the outspoken
free-marketeer views expressed by so many Silicon Valley employers.

Some employers, oblivious to the mountains of resume's which they
receive, will complain that they cannot find people to fill their
open positions. The problem is that the employers are greatly
overspecifying qualifications for the positions. As we will see
here, in so doing the employers are not only making it harder to
fill the positions, but also are harming the productivity of their
companies; a worker's raw analytical talents are much more
important to productivity than the artificially specified job
qualifications.

This overemphasis on paper credentials often leads to an employer
hiring a foreign national, saying that an American could not be found
with specialized skills, or graduate degrees, needed for the job. Our
Ms. Yang cited earlier, for example, was hired ostensibly for her
skills in the OS/2 operating system. This is often merely a pretext.
Ms. Yang, for instance, says her skills in that area were actually
superficial, and others with such skills were rejected if they held
citizen or permanent resident status.

Employer requirements that a worker have a graduate degree or
specialized skills are unwarranted in the vast majority of cases.
For example, there are virtually no jobs in the computer industry
which need a Master's or Ph.D.

One way to see that employers are usually unwarranted in claiming
that their jobs require graduate training is to note that there is
enormous variation in computer science graduate curricula from one
school to another. In other words, there is no such thing, for
instance, as ``generic Master's degree technical skills.'' Thus a
job ad which requires a generic Master's degree cannot have any real
meaning in terms of specific skills. While graduate study may
provide one with a ``culture'' which enhances one's general
analytical abilities, a Master's degree does not provide any
specific technical knowledge needed for the vast majority of jobs
in the field.

Indeed, many of the field's most successful people do not even
have a Bachelor's degree in the computer area, let alone
a graduate degree. Microsoft founder and CEO Bill Gates had no
formal computer training, as is the case for Apple Computer
co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak. Lawrence Ellison,
founder and CEO of the database software giant Oracle Corporation,
does not have a Bachelor's degree either.

John Gilmore, a self-taught programmer with no college education,
was one of the key early software developers for Sun Microsystems,
now an industry leader in computer workstations. Microsoft had also
been heavily recruiting him at the time he joined Sun. (San
Francisco Examiner, August 17, 1995.)

There are many similar cases among rank-and-file programmers, as well
as in academia.

footnote: The fact that so many good programmers are
self-taught does not mean that universities should not offer
undergraduate curricula in computer science. Instead, the point
relevant to the discussion here is that whether a programmer is
self-taught or has a formal degree in computer science, in either
case he/she is using undergraduate-level skills. The vast majority
of jobs in the industry do not use graduate-level material.

A closeup view of the lack of need for graduate training in
computer science may be obtained via Showstopper!, by Wall
Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary (The Free Press, 1995).
The book is a chronicle of the development of Windows NT at
Microsoft, one of the largest, most complex software projects ever
undertaken in the industry. Very few of the major programmers
described in the book have a graduate degree--or even an undergraduate
degree--in computer science. It is worth listing the programmers
whose background is given in the book (if not a U.S. native, this is
noted):

Johanne Caron--Canadian-born, Master's degree in computer science

David Cutler--Bachelor's degree in engineering

Mitchell Duncan--Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering

Moshe Dunie--Israeli-born, Bachelor's degree in engineering

Mike Glass--``attended six colleges in nine years''

Patrick Haluptzok--Bachelor's degree, hired ``not because I
knew how to program, which I didn't, but because they believed
in hiring smart people who'd then learn to program''

Jim Horne--Canadian-born, ``a physics student who had taught
himself programming''

Lou Perazzoli--apparently has no computer science degree, since
he started programming work in the 1970s, before such degrees
were common

Rob Short--some undergraduate coursework in computer science

Therese Stowell--Bachelor's degree in computer science

David Treadwell--Bachelor's degree, field not stated

Steven Wood--has Master's degree in computer science, but calls
his diploma "toilet paper,'' saying academics are out of touch
with reality

Chuck Whitmer--no formal training in computer science

Gilman Wong--electrical engineer, no computer science degree

Again, note that these are Microsoft's top programmers, working on
Microsoft's most innovative, most ambitious project. Yet most did
not have graduate training in computer science. (Note too that
most also were not immigrants.) Moreover, those who did have
graduate degrees were doing the same work as those who lacked
such degrees; their graduate degrees were incidental. Like Gates,
many of these top programmers had no formal training in computer
science at all.

New York University's Alan Gottlieb, one of the field's top researchers
in computer hardware, comes from a mathematics background, not
computer science. Though I have been a software developer in
industry and later became a computer science professor and researcher,
all my degrees are also in mathematics; I too have no formal training
in computer science. And Ron Unz, the multi-millionaire software
entrepreneur who praises the presence of foreign students in American
computer science graduate programs, is himself a self-taught programmer.

Another way to see this point is to look at employment of electrical
engineers. During the 1980s software became dominant among jobs in
the computer industry (e.g. see IEEE Spectrum, August 1993),
so many graduates of electrical engineering programs
took jobs as programmers. Yet most of them had very little formal
training in software, typically only two or three beginning courses.
Indeed, many of the foreign nationals hired and sponsored for
immigration by American software developers also have electrical
engineering degrees, with limited formal background in software.

Professor John Ousterhout of the Computer Science Division at the
University of California at Berkeley has also stated that having a
sharp mind is more important than having formal training.

footnote:
Wall Street Journal, February 21, 1995.

A programmer at a non-profit cancer research center notes, ``The
[foreign programmers] were originally hired because management was
impressed with their MSCS [Master's in computer science] degrees and
high GPA's etc. It's really all bunk...it doesn't mean that they
were any better...In eight years of work experience, I can't say that
they're any better as a group than the citizen programmers.''

One manager in a well-known Silicon Valley firm once startled the
immigrant programmers in his group by blurting out, ``You all have
Master's degrees, while I was a C student who only got a Bachelor's
degree. How come I have more insight than you do?''

The July 11, 1995 edition of the Wall Street Journal carried
an article claiming that hiring foreign-national professionals is vital
to the nation's high-tech industries. The article's central example
was that of Symmetrix, an Austin, Texas designer of automated electronic
test equipment, which has hired foreign students who complete American
Master's programs. Yet in an interview with the author (July 20, 1995),
Symmetrix CEO Paul Hiller said, ``A Master's degree is not really
needed. What counts most is the person himself; is he bright?''

I also interviewed Amit Kamra of Information Systems Transition
Services in Dallas, who had placed an ad on the Internet for foreign
programmers holding H-1B visas.

footnote: August 24, 1995. By the
way, Kamra explained that the only reason he had mentioned H-1B in
the ad was that the firm had recently decided to expand their
applicant pool to include H-1B's. He emphasized that the company
welcomes applications from qualified U.S. citizens and permanent
residents.

Kamra said, ``We don't look much at education...A
graduate degree won't tell me that this person is an exceptional
programmer. Education doesn't tell me about this guy's brain.
Analytical ability is what counts, being able to do problem solving.
It is not so much a matter of working hard as working smart.''

In a Stanford University panel discussion at a conference on
immigration,

footnote: Hoover Institution, October 18, 1996.

,
CEO Dado Banatao of the PC graphics board firm S3 insisted that a
Master's degree is absolutely essential to his company's work.
When I asked him after the session whether this assertion extended
to S3's development branch in India, he said that it did. I
replied that he should check this, but he said that he didn't
have to, and added, ``I know my people.'' And yet a check of
the Indian branch's World Wide Web job page showed that each of
the technical jobs listed gave ``BS or MS'' as a requirement,
that is, applications from workers holding only Bachelor's degrees
were welcome.

Another Stanford event which is interesting in this regard was the
roundtable discussion organized by the Stanford Computer Industry
Project (SCIP) on February 19, 1997, on employer needs in the current
software labor market. SCIP had investigated the market widely,
interviewing many computer-industry hiring managers, combing industry
trade papers such as Computerworld for information, and so on,
They assembled this information into a World Wide Web site for the
participants (industry CEOs and managers, academics, venture
capitalists, etc.) to peruse in preparation for the roundtable
discussion. Entire assemblage of information of the industry's needs in
the labor market, there was quite a bit of material on employer desires
to hire programmers with background in specific software
technologies,

As mentioned earlier, most of the jobs in the industry today are in
software, not hardware. As pointed out earlier, one does not even need
an undergraduate degree, let alone graduate training, to be a good
software designer. Chip design, on the other hand, does of course
require a knowledge of electronic principles. However, once again, an
undergraduate training in these principles is quite sufficient. Perry
Lorenz, an electrical engineer at a well-known semiconductor firm, is a
good example of this. Lorenz has only a Bachelor's degree, and before
going to this firm, had no work experience designing chips. Yet he has
become a top designer in the company. As in the case of software,
Lorenz says that good hardware design is a matter of intellectual
talent, not graduate training. He notes that his colleague Bob Widlar,
who was such a phenomenal designer that when he retired the firm was
said to have paid him not to work for anyone else, also had no graduate
degree.

Similar comments apply to refute employer claims (some of them
pretexts, others sincere) that they need to hire people with
background in specific software technologies, such as was the case
with the aforementioned Ms. Yang's familiarity with the OS/2
operating system. Any competent programmer can become productive
in most software technologies quickly, say in a month or so. This
is borne out by formal studies, as well as on my own experience
in more than 25 years of adapting as the software field has evolved,
and is the consensus of the many people whom I have talked to in the
industry. A typical example is that Lawrence Richards of SoftPac,
when given an assignment as a software contractor to learn Motif
windows programming, became reasonably proficient in three weeks.

Ms. Yee, whom we have mentioned earlier, works for a well-known
Silicon Valley software producer. There is a wide range of ability
among the workers in her division, but in 1990 they all learned
to program in Microsoft Windows within a month.

This point on the quickness with which new software technologies
are learned can be seen in data on factors affecting completion
time for software development projects, cited in one of the central
works on software engineering, Software Engineering Economics, by
Barry Boehm (Prentice-Hall, 1981, p.530). Those data indicate that
programmers reach perhaps 80% of their full productivity level
by one month, and full productivity by the next time period studied,
four months.

Amit Kamra, the head of Information Systems Transition Services
mentioned earlier, said that the firm needed to hire foreign nationals
in order to get people with needed experience in specific software
technologies. Kamra said that the company could not afford to hire
someone who would have to learn the given technology on the job, say
Microsoft Windows programming. But when I asked him how long it would
take for a good programmer to become productive in Windows if he/she
did not know this technology beforehand, he answered, ``[Up] to two
weeks, maybe all the way up to a month and a half to become truly
productive.'' I asked why they did not hire such people, given the
shortness of such time periods, to which Kamra replied, ``Well, we
could, and we did so once with good results [he then gave the
details]...But well, during those two weeks [of learning] the project
is slowed down a bit, especially since others on the project would
have to help the new person.''

It is interesting in this regard that when Rich Allen of Texas
Instruments (TI) was interviewed for an article on the hiring of foreign
nationals in the computer industry, with a possible implication being
that TI hires foreign nationals instead of retraining existing workers,
he emphasized that said that his company provides two to four weeks of
training per year to employees

footnote: Oakland Tribune, March 14,
1996.

--well within the one-month figure I am using as a guideline here
for learning a new skill. And Allen's figures were consistent with
those for companies cited by Computerworld as being most willing
to retrain existing employees (March 31, 1997).

Even software entrepreneur Tony Vickers (who subsequently became a
spokesperson for the Information Technology Association of America, an
industry lobbying organization), in testifying in support of the notion
that the computer industry needs to hire large numbers of foreign
nationals (Commission on Immigration Reform hearing, San Francisco,
November 16, 1995), conceded that new software technologies can be
acquired in a month or so.

Lawrence Richards of SoftPac, a former programmer, noted

footnote: Testimony
to the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, September 28, 1995.

Employers are also using the system to eliminate any costs to themselves
involved in training. Their requirements for exact skill matches
have reached absurd dimensions. For instance, rather than advertise
for someone with knowledge of the database language SQL, they will
insist on experience on a specific database package that uses that
language. Thus someone experienced in Informix will be disqualified
from a job programming in Oracle or Sybase, even though the
differences among these packages may be minor and could be learned
within a month. I, myself have two years experience programming in
Motif, yet many employers will require a year or more experience in
using PowerBuilder for a job, even though this program was designed
to make it easier to generate Motif programs. This requirement for
exact skill matches is also further evidence of the over-supply of
software engineers.

From a national-interest point of view, it makes no sense for an
employer to relegate an American worker to underemployment or
unemployment, in ``disposable'' fashion, just to save a month.

Nor does it make sense to add an extra person to a surplus-plagued labor
force, for a 30-year career (if the foreign national is sponsored for
immigration), just to save a month. Mr. Peng, for instance, originally
worked in Shanghai for a San Francisco-based American software company.
The company found it difficult to direct his work from afar, so it
sponsored him to immigrate to the U.S. Subsequently, though, the
business failed, and he is now a permanent fixture in the labor market
at large.

The point that what counts is talent, not background with specific
software technologies, has been made most clearly by Bill Gates, CEO
of Microsoft. Gates has stated that he prefers to hire sharp minds,
not people with specific technical skills or advanced degrees. Asked
by the Wall Street Journal, ``What would be your profile of the
ideal Microsoft recruit?'', Gates answered,

``We're not looking for any specific knowledge because things
change so fast, and it's easy to learn stuff. You've got to have
an excitement about software, a certain intelligence...It's not
the specific knowledge that counts.''

footnote: Wall Street
Journal, November 8, 1994.

Interestingly Gates' comment above directly clashes with a December 3,
1993 letter to DOL, in which Microsoft attorney Ira Rubinstein
claimed that software industry employers hire foreign nationals
because there are ``too few Americans with advanced or even
undergraduate degrees in science and engineering, or because [the
foreign workers have specific skills needed for the industry] to
remain technologically competitive.''

Indeed, Gates' comment also clashes with his own words later on,
when the issue of hiring foreign nationals became a major topic of
congressional interest in 1995: Gates and other computer industry
executives wrote a letter on September 12 to Congress, saying,
``The continual emergence of new technologies creates shortages of,
and worldwide competition for, specialized engineers who are trained
to implement those technologies.''

The fact is that Gates' original remarks--``We're not looking for
any specific knowledge because things change so fast, and it's easy
to learn stuff''--were the ones that accurately described Gates'
philosophy. Indeeed, Jim McCarthy, one of Gates' software
development managers at Microsoft, points out in his book,
Dynamics of Software Development (Microsoft Press, 1995, p.168),

The biggest mistake I see managers make as they hire people for
software development teams is that they overvalue a particular
technology. To verify this tendency, all you have to do is look at
the want ads: `Wanted: foobar programmers. Experience with whatsit
required.' Obviously, conversance with a given technology is a
wonderful attribute in a candidate, but in the final analysis it's an
extra, not mandatory. After all, most software development
technologies have a half-life of about one year.

Industry analyst Michael Cusumano writes that ``academic researchers
and practitioners alike...[believe that] writing software is and may
forever remain more like an art or craft,'' as opposed to a technical
skill which can be taught. Again, having ``smart people'' is what
counts.

Gil Amelio is the former CEO of National Semiconductor, who in 1996
was hired to ``rescue'' Apple Computer. He has written a book on
management of high-tech firms, Profit from Experience (with
William Simon, Von Nostrand Reinhold, 1996). In listing hiring criteria,
he gives first priority to Strong Personal/Ethical Qualities, and second
priority to Brightness (pp.71-72). For the latter, Amelio says,
``This is not a question of education but of native abilities...natural
curiosity, inquisitiveness, the ability to catch on quickly.'' He
then brings up Experience as a (relative non-)criterion, saying,
``This is the first thing most people look for--which may be one of
the chief reasons so many get hired who don't work out.''

And Gates' point that one can learn the new technology on the job,
during the given project, is illustrated further in the remarks
made by the aforementioned Paul Hiller, the Symmetrix CEO featured
in the Wall Street Journal article on industry hiring of
foreign nationals. Hiller told the author that he too had to train
the foreign nationals whom he had hired.

Some in the computer industry claim that they hire foreign nationals
because American universities are not giving the proper training
to their computer science and engineering students, whereas foreign
universities do train their students well. (See for example TJ
Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, CNN interview, September 14,
1995, and Lance Nagel, industry representative, presentation to the
U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, November 16, 1995.)
Such a claim is immediately seen to be absurd, when it is noted
that the schools in Asia from which the foreign students graduate
almost universally use American textbooks. Moreover, the claim
does not jibe with the industry's actions. In all my years of
teaching computer science at UC Davis (starting in 1980), no one from
industry has ever complained about our curriculum; on the contrary,
in our well-attended annual Industrial Affiliates Conference,
industry people have been very positive about our programs.
Professor Edward Feigenbaum of the Stanford University Computer
Science Department and an expert on the Japanese computer industry
says, ``Few if any authoritative Japanese are satisfied with the
quality of the computer science and information science departments
at Japan's universities. In the United States, I have never heard a
single software industry executive claim to be unhappy with the
output of the computer science departments of U.S. universities.''
(The Future of Software, ed. by Derek Leebaert, MIT Press, 1995,
p.222.)

In discussing the issue that talent is far more important than paper
credentials, perhaps the most telling evidence of all comes from
studies of programmer productivity. A good account of this is
given, for example, in Peopleware: Productive Projects and
Teams, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (Dorset House Publishing Co.,
1987, pp.44ff). These studies show a dramatic 10-to-1 variation in
programmer productivity, by virtually any criterion--time to finish
a product, number of errors, and so on. In other words, the best
programmers work 10 times faster, produce 10 times fewer errors, and
so on, than the worst ones.

footnote: The ratio of the best to the
median is 2.5, as is the ratio of the above-median programmers to
the below-median ones.

In other words, once again raw analytical
talent, not paper credentials, is what really counts.

Edward Yourdon makes this point again and again. (The Decline
and Fall of the American Programmer, Prentice-Hall, 1993, p.54.)
For example, he quotes one software manager: ``The most important
ingredient...[is] hiring smart people...Very little else matters in
my opinion.''
And good managers do know how to identify the smart people. The
book by Microsoft manager Jim McCarthy cited above has some excellent
material on how to do this (pp.166-168). So does the DeMarco and
Lister reference.

One little-known consequence of the labor surplus in the industry is
that many employers now receive so many resume's that they can now afford
to indulge in the ultimate in lazy hiring--many now use machines
which automatically scan resume's for desired key words.

An article in the October 1996 edition of the IEEE's newsletter,
The Institute, describes the problem well:

...job descriptions are becoming much more specific, driven by
keywords instead of human contact.

``In the past, recruiters would talk to people individually and have
a better idea what was going on, and could often convince a company
to hire an engineer and bring them up to speed,'' [industry analyst]
Erickson, said. ``The situation now is a recruiter plugging in words
on a search engine and coming up with people.''

Mike, a hiring manager at Cadence Design Systems, told me in the
fall of 1995 that he could not fill several open positions. He
said that although he had specified skill sets for these jobs,
he would be happy to be more flexible. However, he was not even
getting any resume's from Human Resources, which was automatically
rejecting any resume' that was not a perfect match.

In what amounts to a 1990s variation on What Color Is Your
Parachute?, an article in the San Jose Mercury News, May 17,
1995, was even devoted to advising job seekers as to which typefonts
to use in their resume's, in order to maximize machine readability.

As DeMarco and Lister show, talent is the overriding factor in
productivity. Thus resume'-scanning, by screening for extraneous
factors such as Master's degrees or specialized skills instead of
screening on talent, is resulting in a situation in which employers
are often not hiring the best workers available.

As noted earlier, overemphasis on paper credentials is one of the
reasons for the large variation in salaries in the field. The pool
of programmers satisfying the many conditions in a job ad is of
course small, thus raising salaries for those within that narrow pool,
while at the same time reducing wages and employment opportunities
for those not in such a pool.

By insisting on hiring, say, a programmer who has experience with
TCP/IP network protocols, C++ programming and Motif windows--and
again, we showed earlier why this is unreasonable and indeed harmful
to the industry--an employer is looking at such a narrow pool that
he of course must pay a premium salary.

This in turn leads to further hiring of cheaper foreign nationals.
As noted earlier, according to the Wall Street Journal
(October 9, 1995), ``[Diamond Multimedia Systems CEO William]
Schroeder says that since skilled people can demand a premium salary
in the U.S., it is understandable that employers will seek lower-cost
alternatives abroad.''

Other factors also work to produce the high proportion of immigrants
in the industry, such as network hiring within an ethnic group. This
has often been cited by immigration economists in analyses of low-skilled
labor markets, but it arises with high-tech jobs as well. One often
sees Silicon Valley companies in which certain divisions are almost
entirely Chinese. Many Chinese engineers in the Silicon Valley will
spend the majority of a typical day speaking Mandarin, not
English.

At the company where Ms. Yee works, for instance, most of the
software engineers in her division are Chinese immigrants from Taiwan.
Most hiring is done via word of mouth, so the Chinese immigrant
social network ensures that the group will continue to be Chinese,
with non-Chinese not even being aware of openings. This mirrors
La Opinion labor writer Richard Rothstein's finding at the
low-skilled level that ``Once such powerful networks are established,
policy is impotent to break them.''

footnote: Dissent, Fall 1993.
By the way, though Silicon Valley networking does of course occur with
other ethnicities than the Chinese, it is interesting that UCLA
sociologist Roger Waldinger has in his study of low-skilled workers
in New York also found networking to be particularly prevalent among
the Chinese. (New York Newsday, June 26, 1995.)

Ms. Yee admits that she herself has been a beneficiary of this
practice. Both in the case of this company and of the company
at which she worked previously, she secured her job through the
Chinese social network.

The company may be the loser in this process. The one time that Ms.
Yee did suggest a U.S. native, Mr. Smith, for a position in the group,
Smith was deemed below-standard by all the Chinese who interviewed him.
Ironically, the day was saved for Smith by another immigrant, this one
from India, who was impressed by him and insisted that he be hired.
Smith has turned out to be a star, one of the top few engineers in
the Silicon Valley branch of the company.

Melanie Erasmus points out that ``at Cadence Design Systems, a
software company, foreign-born Chinese-American engineers may
represent as many as 80 percent of the technical
staff.''

footnote: ``Immigrant Entrepreneurs in the High-Tech
Industry,'' in Reframing the Immigration Debate,
published by Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, 1996, p.180.

The practice of ethnic-network hiring has become so refined that
the Chinese Software Professionals Organization even holds its own
job fairs in Silicon Valley, separate from the ones given by
Westech.

footnote: In many California elementary and high schools, Chinese
immigrant parents have even set up their own Chinese Parent-Teacher
Associations (PTAs). In other words, a given school will have both
a Chinese PTA and a mainstream PTA.

In small or medium-sized companies run by immigrants, it is common
to find that virtually the entire technical staff, and even top managers,
consists of immigrants of the same ethnicity as the boss. For example,
Everex, one of the companies immigration advocate Ron Unz has cited as
founded by immigrants--Steve Hui, the founder, is from Hong Kong--had
(prior to going into Chapter 11 status) virtually all of its technical
staff comprised of immigrants from Hong Kong and the neighboring
Cantonese-speaking area in southern China. Pauline Lo Alker, herself
a Chinese immigrant and Silicon Valley CEO, notes that ``There is a
high tendency to surround themselves with people they are comfortable
with.'' (New York Times, January 14, 1992.) It is common
knowledge that those of other ethnicities (including immigrants of
other nationalities) need not apply. This is important, as a large
portion of employer-sponsored green cards come from the smaller and
medium-sized companies.

On July 19, 1995 I interviewed Isaiah Choo, manager of the El Cerrito
Computer Company (San Francisco Bay Area), whose classified ad for a
software engineer I had seen in the July 15 editon of the Chinese-language
Sing Tao Daily. When I asked in which newspapers Choo had
placed an ad, he replied that the only other paper was also
Chinese-language, the World Journal.

footnote: Sing Tao
and World Journal are the two widest-circulation Chinese-language
newspapers in the U.S.

He admitted, ``Yes, we are looking for a Chinese
programmer...No, it is not because of language. We don't care what
language the programmer speaks as long as they get along. Well, I'm
just following the instructions of the Taiwanese owner.''

footnote: Limiting
a job ad to Chinese newspapers is only one of many ways to subvert
the DOL/INS requirement that a job be advertised. For example, the
Kansas City Star (July 16, 1995) reports ``...many Americans
may never even see the ads. Michele Buttelman, an advertising
executive with the Los Angeles Times, said some employers on
the West Coast often camouflage the advertisements by having them
placed under the wrong heading in the newspaper or published on
holidays.''

On August 22, 1995, Xin Ye of New Era Technologies posted a programming
job advertisement in soc.culture.china, a newsgroup on the Internet
read by many students from China studying at U.S. universities. But
the ad was not posted to the newsgroup read by the general public
for job postings, misc.jobs.offered (most of whose job listings are
for positions as programmers); apparently Xin Ye too wanted to hire
only a ``Chinese programmer.''

But even more importantly, Xin Ye's ad shows that the company
especially targets foreign students who are seeking an employer to
sponsor them for immigration: ``If you have just graduated from
school but think you can be a quick learner or have significant
coding experience in school, we would be glad to consider your
experience. We hope you have [a] temporary working visa
(practical training, H-1B temporary visa) so you can start with
[the] project. We'll take care of the visa issue after a short
period of service.''

Note that this company is quite willing to take a new graduate with
no paper credentials. But if this company follows the typical
pattern for the industry for sponsoring foreign nationals for green
cards, the company will hire the person first as an H-1B and then
later when applying for a green card for him/her will claim to the
INS that this employee has ``unique qualifications which American
applicants lacked''--referring to skills the employee acquired
from the employer during that ``short period of service''!

has
some rather detailed analyses of the role of ethnic-network hiring
in Silicon Valley. (It should be noted that Park's focus
tends to be more on manufacturing jobs than in engineering, but
the situation is similar.) Here are some excerpts:

[Page 93:]...After being told to ``hire mostly Koreans,'' she has
advertised job openings in the [Caucasian-owned] firm only through
the San Francisco edition of the Korea Times...

[Page 162:]...Ken [a CEO] feels ``rather embarrassed to admit that with
the exception of two administrative assistants (both are white women),
all of the employees of MCS are not just Chinese, but Cantonese...

The Chinese Software Professionals Organization now even holds its own
job fair, separate from the large ``mainstream'' job fairs such as
Westech.

In recent years a few major employers have begun to cite a new reason
for hiring foreign nationals. They say that in order to produce
software for foreign markets, they need to have workers who are
familiar with the cultures in those countries. One industry lobbyist,
speaking on background, said, ``Say we are producing software for
China. We need a native of China, in order to know how to design the
icons [cute pictures on the screen, on which the user clicks the
mouse] appropriately in a Chinese cultural context.'' But only a
small portion of the foreign nationals being hired work on
international software, and if a company needs cultural advice on
icons, they can hire a native of the culture for an hour or two of
consultation.

When hiring of foreign nationals became a major issue with Congress
in 1995, computer industry employers claimed that they hired the
foreign nationals because they need to hire personnel for a project
immediately, because project delays are quite costly and risk the
company's losing market share. (Electronic Engineering Times,
October 2, 1995.) Yet at the same time they stated that most of the
foreign nationals they hire are foreign students who have recently
graduated from American universities. These two claims are starkly
at odds with each other: Typically hiring of a student is done in the
middle of the student's final semester before graduation, so the
employer needs to wait a couple of months before the foreign national
starts work. Thus, the employer is not hiring the foreign national
to begin work ``immediately'' as claimed.

Moreover, during those months, an existing domestic worker could learn
the given technology instead, as shown in Section 8.1.
Furthermore, what is most crucial in avoiding delays in completing a
project is to hire smart people; after the smart person picks up the
necessary technology, he/she will be the one who best insures timely
completion of the project, while the dullard who is experienced in the
given technology will actually retard progress in the project (this too
is documented in Section 8.1).

Traditionally, in choosing a technical profession such as computers
or engineering, one looked forward to a lifetime of learning new
technologies. Today's computer industry is not allowing its
professionals this opportunity.

During the lobbying in which the computer industry engaged in 1995
and 1996, they admitted to a policy which is tantamount to rampant
age discrimination. For example, here is an excerpt from
``Immigration Issue Divides US Computer Industry,'' IEEE
Computer, February 1996:

The aforementioned Rich Allen of Texas Instruments described
engineering technologies as changing so fast that skills have a
``half life'' of only three years.

Lars Poulsen, head of RNS, a network router firm in Santa Barbara,
said that he aims for a median length of experience of five to seven
years among his engineers. (Interview with the author, June 24, 1996.)

This trend was even noticed in the March 29, 1997 issue of The
Economist, with a statement similar to Intel's :

Age and experience, which elsewhere get people promoted, are no help
in the [Silicon Valley]; on the contrary, there is a distinct bias in favour
of youth. Nowadays the average software-engineering qualification
becomes obsolete in around five years, so a student fresh out of
college may be more valuable to a company than a 40-year-old.

FACE Intel (Former and Current Employees of Intel) states that

...until late 1996 70% of all new hires were required to be New
College Graduates (NCG). While the older or disabled employees were
being targeted and terminated, the majority being hired were younger
and less costly. After our complaints were filed and reviewed by
Intel, the new target, we believe, was reduced to 50%. Incidentally,
the acronym NCG has been replaced by RCG i.e. Recent College
Graduate!!!!!

How did we begin all this? On May 22, 1996 at the annual Intel
stockholders meeting, we asked Intel executives at the meeting why a
majority of FACEI (AXEI at the time) members were over the age of 40.
And why Intel is trying to increase profitability at the expense of
the older employees by a mandated 70% of new hires being NCG's...

Craig Barrett, Intel's Chief Operating Officer, replied to the
downsizing question with, ``The half-life of an engineer, software,
hardware engineer is only a few years...'' One can infer by his remarks
that those employees who were perceived as beyond the ``useful life'' at
Intel have been targeted for termination. This example shows the
philosophy held by Intel's executive staff per our opinion.

Silicon Valley employment agent Maryann Rousseau noted, ``We're taking
many more new graduates, because of the low salary...''

footnote: Interview
with the author, July 1, 1996.

A hiring manager in a Silicon Valley firm is a former UC Davis student
and was unusually frank in my conversation with him on this
topic:

footnote: March 28, 1997.

Well, I want to state that this is in my opinion not a good policy,
but the top management in our company has directed us to focus our
hiring on new or recent graduates only. These are people who have no
family and can work long hours. Yes, salary is a major factor;
that's what it boils down to. You work the young ones for five years
and then replace them. I have objected to this, because I believe
that many of our projects are being hurt by the fact that everyone
is so inexperienced.

(Having programmers work long hours is another way employers save
money. A programmer who works 60 hours per week is in effect doing
the work of 1.5 people for one person's salary.)

The impact of these statements on continued employment prospects for
engineers and programmers is grave: In earlier sections, we have
stressed that talent, not specific skills, should be the prime
criterion for employment, and that employers are hurting themselves
with policies which place undue emphasis on highly-specific skills.
Thus there is no technical basis for comments like that of Eva Jack,
and Jack's comment amounts to an admission of rampant age
discrimination in the industry. This in turn raises extremely
serious societal concerns. One must ask, given this policy of the
industry, what possible incentive would young people have go into the
computer field? Several of my undergraduate computer science
students have mentioned to me that their parents had been laid off
from engineering jobs, and that they were wondering if they should
continue to major in a high-tech field.
The ``bottom line'' once again centers on salary. Every employment
agent and technical recruiter I interviewed mentioned that mid-career
people are generally unattractive due to their high salaries. As I
have pointed out before, new graduates are attractive because
they are cheaper, with new foreign-national graduates being the
cheapest of all. Even sincere employers who pay foreign nationals
the same wages as domestics will save money by hiring new graduates,
and when they run out of domestic new graduates they will turn to new
foreign-national graduates instead of to mid-career domestics.

Ms. Yee, a mid-career worker whom we described earlier, does have a
job but when she looked for another one with a shorter commute, a
number of employers told her that they are concentrating on hiring
people with three years of experience or less. This of course echoes
the comment of Sharon Gadberry, president of Transitions
Management/Outplacement National, who noted that job ads will specify
``five years of experience--they usually mean no more than
that...Companies are trying to screen out the older workers [often to
save on salary].''

footnote: Ms. Gadberry was quoted in the San Jose
Mercury News, September 4, 1995.

An IEEE survey found that job security to be a major concern among
its members, with 84% citing this as either ``important'' or ``very
important.''
Another mid-career engineer notes:

If a programmer with 15-20 years experience is laid off, he is usually in
trouble. (I should point out that this has never happened to me, but I have
seen it happen over the years to others.)...Per company policy, they will
typically get a raise of 4% a year which can put them at the high end of
their salary grade after a few years, definitely by the time they reach
mid-career...As it is easy to hire people with 1-5 years experience
at a lower salary, these mid-career engineers are very vulnerable.''

Prominent software development guru Edward Yourdon comments, ``...a
lot of [mid-career] programmers have disappeared--I've visited
organizations that used to have 100 software people dveloping and
maintaining software for mainframe systems, and then returned two
years later to find that the staff had been reduced to a dozen
younger and less expensive people.'' (The Rise and Resurrection of
the American Programmer, Yourdon Press, Prentice-Hall, 1996, p.10.)
He then notes (p.11) that a major trend (in the computer applications
realm) has been to replace mid-career workers with ``cheap, young
C++ programmers.''

The difficulties mid-career programmers face in seeking employment
have led to the publication of self-help books such as:

Downsized But Not Out: How to Get Your Next Computer
Job, by Alan Simon, McGraw-Hill, 1995.

The Programmer's Job Handbook: The Skills You Need
for Long-Term Job Security and Programming Success, by Gene Wang,
Osborne, 1996.

It is significant that Simon has two such books in this list. In
the preface to the second book, he explains that at the time he wrote
the first one,

...even though a great deal of material about surviving and thriving
in the turbulent times of the early 1990s was included, the emphasis
on career rejuvenation had not been present (perhaps because as
bad as things were beginning to get with respect to career prospects
in the 1990-1991 time frame when I was writing that book, things have
gotten a whole lot worse since then).

The foreign nationals, who are today hired and sponsored for
immigration because of their ``special skills,'' will typically
suffer the same fate. The same skills that they are now hired for
originally will be obsolete several years from now, and these
foreign-born-but-now-naturalized-American workers will find it
hard to get work in the industry.

In other words, industry employers, both those who want to save
money and those who sincerely believe that specific skills are
needed, are operating a Ponzi scheme, luring more and more workers
who will be used for a few years and then discarded, producing
an ever-worsening labor surplus of both native and foreign-born
workers, who are underemployed at best, and in many cases unemployed.

Clearly, the employers' desire to hire younger, cheaper workers is
a problem in its own right, separate from the question of hiring
foreign nationals. But if the foreign nationals were not available
for hire, the employers would be forced to turn to the mid-career
workers they are now shunting aside. As Kim Lee, of the Network
Connections employment agency in the Silicon Valley remarked to
me on June 26, 1996, ``In 1988 the employers would have retrained
[mid-career] people but they're not desperate enough to do so today'';
clearly the availability of foreign workers is making it easy to
ignore the experienced domestic workers.

For the most part, industry employers are not providing retraining,
and are not hiring mid-career professionals even if they get retrained
on their own.

11.2.1 Most Employers Are Not Willing to Retrain

After Senator Alan Simpson introduced his 1995 bill to tighten up our
policy on high-tech hiring of foreign nationals, and Secretary of Labor
Robert Reich stated that the problem was that employers are not
retraining existing professionals, industry officials protested that
they do spend vast sums of money on retraining. For instance, Rich
Allen of Texas Instruments said that his company provides 40 to 80 hours
of training per year to employees.

footnote: Oakland Tribune, March
14, 1996.

However, most employers are not providing retraining for many of
their programmers. The highest estimate I have seen of the percentage
of computer programmers whose employers provide retraining is 20 to 25%
(Computerworld Salary and Job Satisfaction Survey, reprinted from
Computerworld, May 27 and September 2, 1996.)

And even these figures are for existing employees. Almost no
employers are willing to hire a programmer and allow him/her to retrain
on the job.

Recall, for instance, employment agent Kim Lee's statement above: ``In
1988 the employers would have retrained [mid-career] people but they're
not desperate enough to do so today.'' The point was made quite
forcefully by Susan Miller, a computer industry employment agent who
says that 90% of the workers she places are foreign nationals.
(Interview with the author, June 26, 1996.) Pointing out frankly that
her own high income as an employment agent depends largely on the fact
that the industry is not providing retraining for existing employees,
she nevertheless feels that

It's a very closed industry in that respect [retraining]. The trap
the industry falls into is that they don't spend time retraining. It
would be much more cost-effective for them to retrain the employees
they already have; by not retraining they are driving salaries way up,
since so few people have the ``right'' skill sets. The employers
haven't been smart. They have been very closed-minded, with blinders.
If I could change one thing about the industry, that would be it.

Andrew Gaynor, another employment agent, called the industry ``very
short-sighted'' in this regard.

footnote: Interview with the author,
July 1, 1996.

Days after a lobbyist for a major Silicon Valley electronics firm had
told national media about the large sums of money the firm spends
annually on training, I discussed this with a high-level official in
the company. Speaking to me on background, he at first repeated the
large figures his firm spends on training. Yet, when pressed he
conceded that the company mainly provides training for its
technicians, not its engineers or programmers.

One of the rare training programs for laid-off engineers attracted 15
times more applicants than the program could accept (San Jose
Mercury News, January 9, 1996), even though the program had had no
advertising at all. (Personal communication from Jay Pinson.) Clearly,
this would not be occurring if employers themselves were providing
retraining.

Some employers protest, quite correctly, that if they do provide
retraining to an employee, after completing the skills upgrade, the
employee will leave the job in favor of another employer who will
offer a higher salary. But this again is due to the fact that
employers are willing to pay such a premium for background in
special skills in the first place--a premium which is, as I have
said, unwarranted. (Section 8.1.)

11.2.2 Catch-22 for Workers Who Retrain on Their Own

Stuart Anderson, an analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute (which
supports open borders, completely free immigration), has written a
study in support of industry employers. He believes that the problems
of mid-career professionals in finding work in the industry are the
workers' own fault, saying ``It's up to the American worker to make
himself marketable to the industry.'' (Oakland Tribune, March
14, 1996.) Yet this is diametrically opposite of reality:

In general, one cannot simply take a class and then be attractive
to employers, who want actual work experience in the technology. For
instance, a June 3, 1996 article in the Washington Post noted
that a ``hot'' programming language now is C++. Courses in this
language are available at any community college, but most employers
would not even consider hiring someone on that basis.

footnote: The
Washington Post article cited above describes the situation of
Kim Mackey, who ``was frustrated by her [high-tech] employers' reluctance
to give her more opportunities to [use her new programming skills
acquired at a local college]...`I don't think it's so much a shortage
of people,' Mackey said. `The industry needs to start looking from
within.''' Mackey's situation is of course different, but it does
illustrate the point that self-retraining will usually not get one
a job in this field.

Maryann Rousseau, also a computer industry
employment agent, noted

footnote: Interview with the author, July 1,
1996.

``Taking a course is just not going to work for a senior person,
given his salary.''
For that matter, a course is not needed for learning purposes anyway.
A worker could learn to program in C++ on his own, practicing on his
own PC at home, but again, in the case of senior job applicants,
employers will insist on actual work experience with that technology.
This worker's application for a job requiring C++ skills would be
rejected out of hand.

In other words, for established programmers, the only way to upgrade
one's skills is job experience, which produces the classic ``Catch-22''
problem described in the San Jose Mercury News:

footnote: February
17, 1997.

Eric Montague, is a 44 year-old sofware engineer...A programmer since
1978, most of his experience has been on giant mainframe computers made
by Tandem Corp. But most jobs these days involve programming in other
languages, used on workstations and personal computers. Without
experience in those languages, Montague can't get a contracting job.
Without a job, he can't get experience.

One possible strategy for mid-career programmers is to try to join
projects at one's current place of work which employ newer software
technologies. But clearly this involves quite a bit of luck. First,
one must be in the right place at the right time: Your employer starts
such a new project, and you have just finished an old project (using
old technology) and thus are free to work on the new one. Moreover,
even such a fortuitous combination of circumstances may well not
suffice, as Alan Simon describes well in his book mentioned earlier,
Downsized But Not Out: How to Get Your Next Computer Job:

[You can volunteer] for new pilot development programs--ones
which utilize newer, more interesting (and more marketable in terms
of your skills base) technology--but...it's more likely that the
new kids in town, perhaps new college graduates, [will be] assigned
to these high-profile efforts, even though they probably earn
significantly less money at present than you...

Some employment agents whom I interviewed stated that the only
possible strategy for mid-career workers would be to make frequent job
changes. Say a programmer is currently using a technology X which is
beginning to lose its marketability, but wishes to acquire skills in a
new technology Y. Under this strategy, he would try to find a job
which uses both X and Y. He will then hope that he is lucky enough
that (a) such a job exists, and (b) the number of applicants who know
both X and Y is small enough that the employer will be willing to
allow him to learn Y on the job.

Such a strategy is certainly worth a try, but it is fraught with
problems. Andrew Gaynor, the employment agent cited earlier,
finds that ``If you get an 80% [skill-set] fit, you probably hire
the person, but not if it's 50% or 60%.''

footnote: Interview with
the author, July 1, 1996.

Moreover, such a
strategy would have to be employed about every two years or so to
keep up with technology changes, so there are limits to how many
times the strategy could be employed. The programmer, because of
salary increases, becomes less and less attractive to employers
relative to new graduates. Worse, employment agent Maryann Rousseau
noted, ``The current [1996] job market [in which many jobs are available
for those with desirable skill sets] will go away in two years, and
there will be layoffs. Then someone who frequently changed jobs in
the past will be considered a job hopper and thus unattractive.''

Industry lobbyists opposing congressional reform proposals in 1995
claimed that the foreign nationals they hire are the world's ``best and
brightest.'' However, this is generally not the case at all. The
actual situation is as follows:

A small proportion of the immigrant programmers and engineers have
indeed been of exceptionally high talent. We should indeed ``roll out
the red carpet'' for such people, putting their immigration procedures
on a fast track. I personally have urged employers (including my own
department at UC Davis) to hire a number of exceptionally talented
computer scientists from China, India and so on.

But in general, the immigrant computer professionals have been of
average technical ability at best. In fact, many have been of well
below-average quality. These low-quality individuals have actually
harmed the industry.

Since the industry lobbyists have made quality a central issue in
their efforts to oppose congressional reform proposals, I will
address this issue in substantial detail, with two main points:

[(a)] The vast majority of major technical advances in the computer
field have been made by U.S. natives, not immigrants.

[(b)] A disproportionate number of the immigrant programmers have
been technically weak, adversely impacting the productivity of their
employers.

In other words, not only has immigration not been key to the industry's
technical advancement [item (a) above], but arguably the overly-casual
hiring of foreign nationals has actually hurt the industry [item
(b)].

12.1 The Industry's Major Technological Innovations Have Not
Come from Immigrants

It is true that a few immigrant computer professionals have achieved
prominence in their fields. For instance, An Wang, founder of Wang
Laboratories, was a major contributor to early core memory technology.
Again, our nation benefits greatly when employers bring truly
exceptional foreign talents to the U.S., and this should be continued.
But it is incorrect to attribute the major technological advances of the
industry to immigrants. The vast majority of such advances have been
made by U.S. natives.

This can be seen in rough form, for example, in the awards given for
industrial innovation by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),
the nation's main computer science professional society. Of the 39
recipients of the ACM Software System Awards, only one has been an
immigrant. Of the 17 recipients of the Eckert-Mauchly Award, given for
advances in computer hardware, none has been an immigrant. In other
words, of the 56 top innovators in the computer industry (as viewed by
the ACM), only one is an immigrant.

There is of course some degree of subjectivity in these awards.
But the same pattern is exhibited repeatedly in the awards given
by numerous organizations: in 17 pages of awards listed in the
Computer Industry 1994-95 Almanac,

the vast
majority of recipients are U.S. natives. For example, of 115 U.S.
recipients of computer-related IEEE awards, only nine have been
immigrants.

Similarly, one can consider the names mentioned in the index of
Michael Malone's The Microprocessor: A Biography
(Springer-Verlag, 1995), a history of the computer chip industry.
Excluding people in functions such as marketing, i.e. restricting
attention only to engineers and scientists, there are 89 names.
Of these, only 10 are immigrants (though another five live
abroad).

I also conducted an informal poll among computer science and
electrical engineering faculty at UC Davis. Interestingly, nearly
half of those UCD faculty who chose to respond are themselves
foreign-born. Yet of the 29 people in the U.S. they listed as top
innovators, only two are immigrants.

footnote: It has been suggested
that numbers of patents might be good measures of immigrant
engineering talent. But patents in the computer field are generally
awarded to members of a project. The main participants in the
project will have their names on the patent, even if the basic ideas
stemmed mainly from only one person. Thus holding a patent is often
a matter of ``being in the right place at the right time,'' rather
than being indicative of the holder's having special talent.
Accordingly, the proportion of immigrant patent holders roughly
mirrors--though is still less than--the proportion of immigrant
engineers in the field.

After hearing industry lobbyists emphasize that they hire foreign
nationals in order to get the world's ``best and brightest,'' many
people are quite surprised by the award statistics presented above.
Given that about one-third of Silicon Valley engineers and programmers
are foreign-born, for instance, how could there be so few top innovators
among them? The answer to this question turns out to be cultural: Most
of the immigrants in the Silicon Valley are from East Asian cultures
which emphasize rote-memory learning, which stifles creativity. In
Appendix 16 I discuss the details of this, so that the
relative lack of immigrants in the innovation awards lists will make
sense.

Many of the immigrant programmers in the U.S. are not only not of top
quality, but actually weaker than average. Even Arthur Hu, a
Chinese-American programmer and former columnist for Asian Week
who bitterly opposes congressional efforts to tighten up conditions
under which computer industry employers can hire foreign nationals, has
conceded this point. Hu has stated in the Center for Immigration
Studies electronic discussion group IMPOLICY that ``[the immigrant
programmers are] not as bright as the best Americans,'' and that ``In my
experience, people from Taiwan and India who make less and get worse
jobs simply aren't as good [as their American coworkers].'' (November 29
and 30, 1995.)

Recall that a Hewlett-Packard representative admitted under oath in a
court proceeding that the Indian programmers he was importing were not
as good as those from, say, the nearby University of California at
Berkeley.

Again, there are cultural reasons for this weakness, discussed at length
in Appendix 16.

One might naively presume that the weak people hired (whether immigrant
or native) would soon be discovered, after they actually began work,
and be forced out of the industry. On the contrary, many are
actually entrenched in the industry, if they have the skill set
which is currently popular, for three reasons:

First, due to a fear of lawsuits Silicon Valley employers will almost
never fire a programmer for poor performance.

footnote: This is true
nationally too. See The Decline and Fall of the American
Programmer, Prentice-Hall, 1993, p.56.

Similarly, when one employer
asks a job applicant for a reference, the employer will not insist
that the reference be the applicant's supervisor. Thus many
applicants will use friendly co-workers as references. In addition,
again because of fear of lawsuits, many employers simply refuse to
act as a reference, other than confirming dates of employment.
Second, the phenomenon of networked hiring works to keep the weak
immigrant workers employable as well, if they are of an ethnicity
which has an active social network.

One might also think that an applicant who has the ``right'' paper
credentials but who is weak intellectually will be exposed during the
resulting interview, but in practice it does not work out this way.
As noted by DeMarco and Lister in the Peopleware reference
cited earlier, ``It would be ludicrous to think of hiring a juggler
without first seeing him perform. That's just common sense. Yet
when you set out to hire an engineer or a designer or a programmer or
a group manager, the rules of common sense are suspended. You don't
ask to see a design or a program or anything. In fact, the interview
is just talk.''

In recent years many employers have taken to testing applicants
during an interview (this was considered gauche in the past), but
even then the questions tend to be superficial, as a real test of
understanding would involve having the applicant work on a real
problem (i.e. ``perform,'' using the juggler metaphor) for a day or
two, which of course is infeasible.

As a result, if a weak programmer has the right combination of
specific skills demanded by an employer for a given job, he/she is
apt to be hired. In short, the main factor which determines
a mid-career programmer employability is his skill set, not his
talent.

Employers who hire weak people (again, whether immigrant or native)
primarily because they have experience in the desired skill set are
shooting themselves in the foot. In another DeMarco book,
Controlling Software Projects, the author says,

...there are people on almost all projects who insert enough spoilage
[program bugs] to exceed the value of their production. Let me state
that in its baldest form: Taking a poor performer off your team
can often be more productive than adding a good one [italics are
DeMarco's]...In a team of ten, expect as many as three people to have
a defect rate high enough to make them net negative producers.

Since virtually all the employers use the same inappropriate criteria
(i.e. specialized skill sets) on which to screen job applicants, the
market has not penalized employers for their poor hiring techniques.
Virtually all employers overemphasize paper credentials instead of
talent, so that market competition results in bidding up the salaries
of those with highly-specific skill sets instead of those of the more
talented workers. DeMarco and Lister found that on the average,
programmers who were twice as productive were paid only 10% more.

(And the market does not penalize poor products either. For example
the Intel processor chips are, by consensus of everyone including Intel,
not well designed--Bill Gates called them ``brain damaged''--yet
Intel is by far the market leader.)

Industry companies would be more productive if they were to hire on
the basis of talent rather than skill sets. The companies' products
would come to market earlier, with fewer bugs and more innovative
features, etc., as described above.
Ordinarily the issue of whether private employers are hiring the
best talent would be beyond the government's purview, but that is not
the case here. On the contrary, Congress established the H-1B
and employment-based green card programs at the request of employers.
These programs are in fact federal subsidies to the industry,
especially in view of the salary savings enjoyed by the employers.
Thus Congress has a legitimate interest in investigating signs
(e.g. those presented throughout Section 7.4 of this report)
that the programs are reducing, rather than enhancing, the quality of
work performed by the industry.

Some lobbyists opposing reform of skills-based immigration laws in
1995 extolled the virtues of immigrant entrepreneurs in the computer
industry. Such claims have been quite distorted in various ways.
For brevity, I will focus on the most commonly cited example, Intel,
the market leader in CPU chips (central processing units) for
personal computers. The Intel situation has been grossly distorted
by the lobbyists.

The Intel CPU chip has not been indispensable to the PC industry. Back
in 1981 when IBM needed to select a CPU chip for its new PCs, IBM had
many alternatives to its choice of Intel as a CPU supplier. There was
nothing technically special about Intel--
whichever CPU chip
IBM chose would have become the market leader, just because of the power
of the IBM name at that time.

footnote: See for example: The
Microprocessor: A Biography, by Michael Malone, Springer-Verlag, 1995,
p.168, and Intel CEO Andrew Grove's book Only The Paranoid
Survive, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1996, p.46.

Indeed, the Intel chip not
only was not indispensable to the industry, its selection by IBM for the
PC has actually hurt the industry. The consensus throughout the
industry

footnote: Including Intel itself. See the interview with Intel
co-founder Gordon Moore, PC Magazine, March 1997.

is that the
Intel chip was badly designed. The IBM engineers in Boca Raton, Florida
who designed the original PC favored a competing chip by
Motorola

As mentioned earlier, Bill Gates has called the
Intel chip ``brain-damaged,'' citing the fact that the Intel chip's
handling of memory access was extremely cumbersome to write software
for.

footnote: See my textbook on Intel programming, IBM PC
Microcomputer Architecture and Assembly Language, Prentice-Hall, 1991,
and a more advanced book by the two top researchers in computer
architecture, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, by
John Hennessy and David Patterson, Morgan-Kaufman, 1996, Appendix D.

As
a result, enormous amounts of programmer productivity have been wasted,
resulting in development delays and high software costs, though these
problems were for the most part resolved once the 32-bit chips were
developed in the early 1990s.

Thus the Intel chip was not essential to the PC, and arguably the PC
would have been better without it. By the way, Intel should not be
portrayed an immigrant entrepreneurial story in the first place.
CEO Andy Grove did indeed immigrate to the U.S. as a refugee from
Hungary (note: not as a skills-based immigrant), but he was not one
of Intel's founders. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce founded the
company, though it is true that Grove did go to work for Moore and
Noyce at a very early stage. Moreover, Grove's entire career at
Intel has been in management. He had already been in management at
his previous employer, Fairchild, rather than in direct technical
work. It is misleading to imply that Intel's success is due to
his technical input. Instead, as Michael Malone puts it, ``Whereas
Noyce was the diplomat and industry hero and Moore the technical
genius, Grove was the man who could do what it takes to make his
company successful. (The Microprocessor: A Biography, by
Michael Malone, Springer-Verlag, 1995.)

To be sure, some immigrant-founded computer companies have made
some technological contributions, as mentioned before for the case of
An Wang's Wang Laboratories. Again, we should facilitate the
immigration of engineers of extraordinary talent, such as Wang.
But generally the immigrant entrepreneurs have not played pivotal
roles in the industry's technological development.

Asian-American activists have recently been claiming that 300 out of 800
companies in Silicon Valley are headed by people of Asian ancestry. The
source of this claim is an article by Edwin Park.

footnote: ``Immigrant
Entrepreneurs in the High-Tech Industry,'' in Reframing the
Immigration Debate, published by Leadership Education for Asian
Pacifics, 1996.

Yet Park's citation, an article by Andrew Pollack in
the January 14, 1997 edition of theNew York Times, does not
contain this statistic.

footnote: I have brought this to Professor Park's
attention. As of May 16, 1997, he was not sure where he got the
statistic, and will check.

In any case, Park does mention that many of
these Asian companies are in the manufacturing segment of the market,
not technological development, and more importantly, the 300/800
fraction, if correct, is

14. The Role of Foreign Students in
American Computer Science Ph.D. Programs

similar to the proportion
of Asians (immigrant and native) in the industry and the region.

Much has been made by supporters of immigration of the fact that a
hefty percentage of Ph.D. degrees in science and engineering granted by
American universities are awarded to foreign students, many of whom
become immigrants after graduation. What this ignores is that these
students are not needed. On the contrary, our universities are
producing too many Ph.D.'s, causing a glut on the labor market.

As noted earlier, virtually no jobs in the computer industry
require graduate training. And although in academia a Ph.D. is of
course needed for faculty positions at Ph.D.-granting universities,
that job market has become extremely tight. For example, the UC Davis
Computer Science Department received 460 applications for
faculty positions during the 1994-1995 academic year--for only
three openings.

Sadly, in the late 1980s Congress was very much misled by a National
Science Foundation (NSF) report which claimed a looming nationwide
shortage of scientists and engineers. This resulted, for example, in
Congress increasing the skilled-labor quota, in the 1990 Immigration
Act.

The NSF now concedes that its projection was incorrect (
Sacramento Bee, March 27, 1994), and policy makers are just
recently discovering that large numbers of Ph.D.'s are either
unemployed or underemployed.

footnote: See ``No Ph.D.'s Need
Apply,'' Newsweek, December 5, 1994.

A recent report
by William F. Massy of Stanford University and Charles A.
Goldman of the RAND Corp., The Production and Utilization
of Science and Engineering Doctorates in the United States,
studies the problem in great detail.

Indeed, Massy and Goldman point out that production of Ph.D.'s in
science and engineering is geared not to labor market needs, but
rather to the ``needs'' of university faculty to produce Ph.D.'s! A
faculty member's rise in the ranks will depend to a great degree
on how much federal and private grant funds he/she is able to attract,
and how many Ph.D. students he/she produces (the funds are used
to provide financial support to the students). Massy and Goldman
quote a chair of a major Computer Science Department as saying that
he sets the enrollment level for his department's graduate program by
simply multiplying a per-faculty quota for Ph.D.'s by the number
of faculty in the department; this is standard practice.

Intel has been one of the most vociferous Silicon Valley companies to
insist that it hires foreign nationals because Intel finds a shortage
of domestic engineers with graduate degrees. Thus it is instructive
to look at the field of greatest interest to chip manufacturers such
as Intel--electrical engineering. Quite contrary to Intel's claim,
Massy and Goldman find that we are overproducing electrical
engineering Ph.D.'s by 44%. The August 1, 1994 issue of
Electronic Engineering Times, in reporting its latest salary and
employment survey, noted, ``...there is a glut of technically trained
Ph.D.'s. Though it seems hard to believe that companies would avoid
hiring well-trained engineers with doctorates, Ph.D.'s tell us that
they're seen as overqualified and overpriced on the 1994 job market.''
A San Jose Mercury News story of June 22, 1995 mentioned
Sanford Dickert, a Stanford University Ph.D. student, who ``drew up
two resume's, one touting him as a doctoral candidate in electrical
engineering, the other simply listing his undergraduate degree in
electrical engineering from Purdue University. The second got more
responses.'' Paul Hiller, the Symmetrix CEO whom we mentioned earlier
and who hires mainly electrical engineers, told the author that he
too views a Ph.D. as a negative.

So much for electrical engineering; what about computer science?
Massy and Goldman estimate only a small degree of overproduction of
Ph.D.'s in computer science, in the sense of unemployment rates.
Computer science Ph.D.'s are still able to find jobs.

footnote: Though
not without some apprehension. The Computing Research News,
March 1996, reports that in 1995, ``...despite student fears, almost
all new Ph.D.'s appear to have gotten jobs.

But that does not address
the main point, which is that while a Ph.D. may be employed, he/she is
in almost all cases doing work which does not need a Ph.D. In fact
the Computing Research Association's statement circulated on the
Internet, responding to the original report by Massy and Goldman, even
quotes Chief Technology Officer Forrest Baskett of Silicon Graphics as
saying that in spite of the considerable number of doctorates hired by
his company, his company's jobs do not require a Ph.D.

footnote: E-mail
broadcast to all major academic computer science department chairs by
Professor Ed Lazowska, University of Washington, July 28, 1995.

He,
as with others, says that what he really wants is sharp minds.

Overproduction of computer science Ph.D.'s was a major theme in an
article by Professor Anthony Ralston of the State University of New
York at Buffalo in the Communications of the Association for
Computing Machinery (March 1996), the ACM's flagship professional
journal. Ralston writes:

[In the coming years] we are almost certain to continue to produce
more--probably far more--Ph.D.'s in computer science than will be
able to find the kinds of research jobs which attracted them to seek
doctorates in the first place, and perhaps more than will be able to
find jobs at all. Many of us are, in fact, accepting students under
false pretenses...

Ralston goes on the say that the Ph.D.'s may still be hired for
computing jobs that do not need a Ph.D., but countered, ``But does
this justify the cost--to taxpayers, to government, to the students
themselves--when the attainment of a Ph.D. adds little to the
abilities of the candidates to do [these] jobs?''

footnote: Ralston's
point about the taxpayers refers to the vast sums spent by the
federal government for the research projects on which the Ph.D.
students work.

The increase in on-campus recruiting by industry employers in 1996
has led to a 25% decrease in applications for graduate programs in
computer science.

footnote: Computing Research News, March 1996.
The same publication reported an increase in 1997, though.

Thus,
because a central part of the job of university faculty is to bring
in federal research grants which pay the salaries of Ph.D. students,
the ironic result of the increased attention employers have paid to
new domestic Bachelor's degree holders will be that the universities
will now bring in even more foreign graduate students.

The industry lobbyists opposing congressional reform of laws governing
the hiring of foreign nationals have repeatedly claimed that a major
reason why employers hire foreign nationals is that the employers
need to hire people with graduate degrees. I have already detailed
why this claim is incorrect in Section 8, and as we have seen
here in this section, the nation actually is producing too many Ph.D.'s
as it is.

Moreover, the industry has never acted on its claims to need graduate
work in its employees. I have been Graduate Admissions Coordinator
for Computer Science at UC Davis since 1983, and have served for a
number of years on our Computer Science Undergraduate Curriculum
Committee. Our department has excellent contacts with the computer
industry, including a yearly Industrial Affiliates conference which is
quite well-attended. Yet in all that time, never once has anyone
from industry urged me to get more domestic students to attend
graduate school. The industry's claim to hire foreign nationals
because insufficient domestic students pursue graduate study simply
does not jibe with the industry's own actions.

In 1995 there was much discussion of the fact that most foreign Ph.D.
students are supported by federal and state funds. This is correct.
However, it obscures the main point, which is that we are producing
too many Ph.D.'s in the first place; the fact that many of them are
foreign students is secondary.

In the debate on immigration reform in 1995, the claims was often made
that the foreign students who come to the U.S. for graduate study
are the top students in their home countries. This claim is false.
Though there are indeed some truly outstanding foreign students,
most of them in a handful of world-class schools such as UC Berkeley
and Stanford University, most are not in this category.

When a foreign national applies for a U.S. student visa, there is of
course no requirement that the student be especially talented. He/she
merely needs to have been admitted to some U.S. school, and again there
is no requirement that that school be particularly selective in its
admissions policies. On the contrary, since without foreign students
the graduate programs for many U.S. universities would
collapse,

or at least be forced
into severe scaling down, the schools have no incentive to have high
standards in their admissions policies.

David North's Soothing the Establishment: the Impact of
Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers on America, (University Press of
America, 1995, p.43) contains some data on Graduate Record Examination
(GRE) scores among applicants to graduate school in 1993. Let us
examine the scores among engineering students.
The mean for the foreign students was approximately 3% higher than
for U.S. citizens on the Quantitative Test, but the foreign students
scored about 10% lower than the citizens on the Analytical Test.
The Quantitative Test score difference is small and of little interest
anyway, since the test's coverage does not extend beyond the high-school
level; this limitation has long been a frustration to graduate
admissions officers in engineering.

footnote: The Educational Testing
Service originally had a plan to offer a new version of the Quantitative
Test designed for students in engineering and the physical sciences,
but later abandoned it.

On the other hand, we at UC Davis have found
the GRE Analytical Test to be a strong predictor of success in our
computer science graduate program (among both domestic and foreign
students).

Thus the claim that the foreign graduate students are in general
better than the domestic ones is not borne out.

One often hears that the presence of so many Asian foreign students
in U.S. computer science graduate programs is due to the fact that
Asians have high respect for education. This is true to a limited
degree, but the overriding factor is typically that they are using
these programs as steppingstones to immigration. By contrast,
Asian-
Americans (at least first-generation ones)
also value education highly, and yet their numbers in those same
computer science graduate programs are low, in spite of
their high enrollments in computer science at the undergraduate level.
The major factor underlying this difference is that the Asian-Americans
already have U.S. citizenship or green cards; a graduate education
has no immigration value for them, so they tend not to pursue a
graduate degree.

UCLA Asian-American Studies professor Paul Ong, along with Evelyn
Blumenberg, note that although graduate degrees do not bring enough
extra salary to make the degrees a good investment for domestic
students, for foreign students the degrees represent tickets to
immigration: ``...the low rate of [monetary] return [i.e. extra
salary] for advanced degrees within the U.S. labor market...is not a
disincentive for Asian foreign students. Indeed, receiving such a
degree can offer a high rate of return because it increases the
probability of working in the U.S. for these individuals.'' (
The State of Asian Pacific America, Paul Ong (ed.), LEAP Asian
Pacific American Public Policy Institute and UCLA Asian American
Studies Center, 1994. p.175.)

And even the Asian foreign students who had originally stated their
intention to pursue a Ph.D. often stop at a Master's. In the last
few years our Ph.D. program in computer science at UC Davis has had
ten students drop out. All ten were foreign students, who quit once
they found Silicon Valley employers who would hire them and sponsor
them for immigration. The students' basic goal was to secure a
green card, rather than to get a graduate education.

Many American schools exploit this goal of the foreign students, as
the schools need the ``bodies,'' in order to meet their own goals
of Ph.D. production, and in order to populate the schools' graduate
courses. The universities are aware of the ``immigration steppingstone''
nature of the attraction of graduate study for the foreign students,
and indeed the foreign-student adviser offices at many universities
(both private and public) dispense advice on immigration procedures
to foreign students. In November 1995, the first version of Senator
Alan Simpson's bill S1394 was released, containing a provision
requiring foreign students to return to their home countries for
three years. The National Association of Foreign Student Advisers
immediately launched a lobbying campaign against the bill, saying
(correctly) that the foreign students simply would not come to school
in the U.S. if this provision of the bill were enacted.

Current law involving the hiring of foreign nationals is fraught
with forces encouraging--often in fact even requiring--cynical
behavior by all parties involved. To illustrate this, consider
the typical milestones which will occur for a foreign student in
computer science:

When a student in a foreign country goes to a U.S. consulate in
that country to apply for a student visa to the U.S., he must sign a
form stating his only intention in the U.S. is education, and that he
does not intend to stay in the U.S. permanently. Since most foreign
students in computer science come to the U.S.
with the
intention of staying permanently, the System is requiring the student
to tell a lie, in his very first interaction with the U.S. government.

At the same time, the officials in that U.S. consulate are
charged with the responsibility of determining whether applicants
for student visas do intend to stay in the U.S. permanently. The
officials know that, statistically speaking, most of the students
have such an intention, but it is impossible to determine this in
individual cases. As one consular official put it, ``Sec. 214(b) of
the Immigration and Nationality Act [in effect] requires that the
consular officials have the ability to look into the hearts and
minds'' of the applicants, an absurdity. So, as an official certifies
applicant after applicant as being free of this intention, he knows
the whole process is a sham.

When a student finishes his study in a U.S. university and finds
a job with an American employer, he typically will work first under
the Practical Training provision of the F-1 student visa. The Practical
Training program was established with the goal of complementing a
foreign student's theoretical coursework with industrial experience
before returning to his home country. But of course what the Practical
Training program has evolved to instead is a holding pattern which
tides the student over until the employer's petition for his
green card is approved by the INS.

In order to get the student's Practical Training application approved,
the university (typically the student's faculty adviser) must write a
letter stating how the practical work experience the student gains
from the employer will be helpful to the student when he returns to
his home country. The universities, of course, are aware of the fact
that the student will not be returning home, making the letter, at best,
an exercise in hypocrisy.

At some point the employer will begin the paperwork to petition
to the INS for the student's green card. To do so, the employer will
have to take out newspaper ads to advertise the position, all the
while knowing that the ads are meaningless, since the employer has
already hired the student for the job in question. This cynical act
is typically made even more cynical by the fact that the ad is actually
tailored around the student's qualifications, making it virtually
impossible for anyone but the student to ``qualify'' for the job.

In other words, all parties involved, even if they would prefer to
act sincerely and openly, are virtually forced by the System into
acts of dishonesty.

It should be noted that in this cozy relationship,
everyone has powerful incentives to ``go with the flow'':

The students will acquire their immigrant status, which is
their main goal.

The universities will get ``bodies'' to populate their graduate
courses

footnote: This is important to many faculty, who would rather
teach graduate courses than teach the ``lower'' undergraduate courses.
At private universities, though, it is more than just a matter of
faculty preference: Many private universities use their Master's
programs as revenue generators. Thus it is no accident that of the six
schools producing the most Master's degrees in engineering in 1996, all
six are private institutions. (Engineers: A Quarterly Bulletin on
Careers in the Profession, January 1997).

and enable the schools to get
lucrative federal research grants.

The employers will get cheap labor.

It is thus not surprising that these same three groups comprised the
major players in the lobbying against congressional proposals for
reform of laws governing the hiring of foreign nationals: the
students, the universities and the employers. And the lobbying
itself displayed the cynical behavior fostered by the System, such
as:

In the short space of just two weeks, a handful of students
from China, calling itself the Association for Chinese Community
Affairs (itself a cynical act, as the name connotes Chinese-Americans,
as opposed to Chinese foreign nationals), collected 15,000 signatures
for a petition from the Internet, with the vast majority of the
signatores being foreign students. The petition was presented to
numerous congressional offices. The Chinese student campaign against
the Simpson bill continued to be organized on the Internet after that,
including by a highly active group of students from China at UCLA. The
latter group's World Wide Web site advised Chinese students to lie
when calling Senator's offices, saying that the students should let
the staffers assume that the students are U.S. citizens: ``Senators
simply are not supposed to check upon your visa status, even [if]
you're an F-1 [foreign-student visa] student...Do not worry about
your [foreign student] status. Yes, you are counted as voting
citizens because they never bother to ask the status. Therefore, in
fact, your voiced opinion is really an American Citizen's opinion
from their point of view because they cannot tell the difference.''

As mentioned earlier, the National Association of Foreign
Student Advisers launched a campaign against the Simpson bill.
Their point was perhaps more honest, but just as cynical, saying
that the foreign students will not come to the U.S. for education
if they are not allowed to immigrate, thus recognizing the fact
that the goal of the students is green cards, not education.

As also mentioned earlier, the computer industry organized
an extremely heavy attack on the Simpson bill, not at all bargaining
in good faith, prompting Simpson to say, as we noted earlier, ``I
was working with the business community...to address their concerns,
[but] each time we resolved one, they became more creative, more novel.
[The lobbyists] distorted everything we were up to, everything.''
(San Jose Mercury News, March 8, 1996.)

Supporters of the current immigration policy on skilled immigrants
claim that if American employers are not allowed to hire immigrant
computer professionals at low wages in the U.S., the employers will
ship the work to foreign countries. It is true that some companies
are experimenting with this, but this is not likely to become the
major mode of operation of the industry. The misunderstandings
caused by long-distance communication, the problems of highly-disparate
time zones and so on can result in major headaches, unmet deadlines
and a general loss of productivity.

And it must be kept in mind that a project does not end when
the product has been released to the customers. The product must
constantly be updated, as bugs are discovered and users demand more
features. Thus the problems associated with long-distance software
development are continuing, not temporary.

Recall our example of Mr. Peng, who originally worked in Shanghai for
a San Francisco-based American software company. In the end, that
long-distance operation did not work, so the company had to bring
him to the U.S.

The two top leading researchers in computer architecture
write

footnote: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach,
by John Hennessy and David Patterson, Morgan-Kaufman, 1996, p.D-24

about Intel's 8087 ``math chip'' which accompanied the early Intel
CPUs (and was later incorporated into them):

The Intel 8087 was implemented in Israel, and 7500 miles and 10
time zones made communication difficult with [Intel's headquarters
in] California. According to
Palmer and Morse [1984], ``Unfortunately no one tried to write a
software stack manager until after the 8087 was built, and by then
it was too late; what was too complicated to [make efficient] in
hardware turned out to be even worse in software...''...As Kahan
[1990] says: ``Consequently [language compilers produce inefficient
code], degrading the chip's performance by typically 50%...''

Such problems were also mentioned to the author in 1995 by Symmetrix
CEO Paul Hiller, who is engaged in a joint venture with a company in
India. He said that the problems of long-distance communication had
really impeded progress on the project. He added, ``You really need
to be able to talk [about the project] face to face.''

This point is made quite forcefully in UC Berkeley Professor AnnaLee
Saxenian's study of the computer industry, Regional Advantage
(Harvard University Press, 1994, pp.156ff). For example, she quotes
Tom Furlong, former manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's
workstation group in Palo Alto as saying, ``Physical proximity is
important to just about everything we do...The level of communication
is much higher when you can see each other regularly. You never
work on the same level if you do it by telephone and airplane...An
engineering team simply cannot work with another engineering team
that is three thousand miles away, unless the task is incredibly
explicit and well defined--which they rarely are.''

Professor Saxenian writes, ``Other executives noted that proximity
was essential for the detailed and often continuous engineering
adjustments required in making complex electronics products. In
the words of the president of a [computer] power supply manufacturer
that moved part of its manufacturing from Hong Kong to Silicon
Valley in the late 1980s to be closer to a major customer:
`I don't care how well the specifications are written on paper,
they are always subject to misinterpretation. The only way to
solve this is to have a customer's engineers right here. There
is no good way to do it if you are more than fifty miles away.'"

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News (March 9, 1997),
Scott Cook, co-founder and chairman of Intuit Inc. said:

We have 15 locations around the globe, including nine in the US. And
with only one exception they're humming. For the last 6 months Bill
Campbell (Intuit's chief executive) and I have been just 2 miles from
our new corporate campus. We'll move there when new space opens up next
year. We have e-mail, Picturetel, and more. Yet I'll tell you it stinks.
We miss the feel of the people, the managing by walking about, the quick
decision in the hall, the subtle sense about how managers are handling
their job, the serendipitous encounter than saves two people weeks of
working in different directions, the technicolor feedback that helps
managers coach their people. Both Bill and I are opening up satelite
offices in Intuit's (current) campus.

Great businesses excel most in their informal processes and culture, not
in their official documents--RFPs, financial statements, budgets--and
formal meetings. Video is great for formal stuff, lousy for informal.
What are you going to do--have a video robot that simulates walking
about by roaming into peoples' offices?

In the same article, Bill Gates said,

For a company like Microsoft, it's worth a real premium for us to have
very strong collaboration. We have found projects that make sense to do
other places, in Israel, in Tokyo for example. But it makes sense for
the bulk of our operations to be in one location and for the foreseeable
future we're going to stick with that.

We will spend what is necessary to have most of our development groups
at our headquarters and have them meeting face-to-face every day. We
want to make sure there is a place where customers can come in and talk
to us in person and make sure the products fit together in the right
way.

Edward Yourdon, quotes software consultant Carol Colvin: ``Despite
increased communications via satellite...I have yet to see a project
where specs could be delivered and the programmers code in isolation
and deliver a useful product.'' (The Decline and Fall of the
American Programmer, Prentice-Hall, 1993, p14,) And it is
significant that Yourdon, who expressed some disagreement with Colvin
at that time, has now changed his mind. In his new book, The
Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, Yourdon Press,
Prentice-Hall, 1996, p.9, he says, ``...there is constant
interaction between the end user and the software developers...It's
difficult enough managing this kind of interactive development when
the users are located right next door to the software developers; it's
much more difficult when the developers are on the other side
of the world...So, effective offshore programming is undoubtedly more
difficult than I originally suggested.''

A Wall Street Journal article (March 13, 1996), quotes Derek
Leebaert, who is working with programmers in Serbia: ``We're still
at the stage where you need a trusted manager on site, in the foreign
country. That's a very limiting factor.''

Michael Cusumano reports that ITT Corporation's efforts to promote
``software reusability'' (in which modules developed for use in one
piece of software could be used in others) were impeded by the
international nature of the company: ``Reusability became a
technical and cultural issue because...ITT had [software] developers
spread out around the world, hindering communication across
projects.''

footnote: Reference cited earlier, p.99.

In this regard it is worth noting that most large programs are composed
of many modules, with different modules often written by different
individuals or groups. Yourdon (p.186) notes that Bell Labs found
that 40% of its software bugs arose from incorrect interfaces
between modules. Given that interpersonal or intergroup interface
is already this error-prone within a small geographical region, one
again can see how such problems would be compounded in an international
setting.

Problems of worker continuity must also be considered. Say you are
manager of a company shipping department, and your inventory-control
software suddenly develops a bug. If the only person who really
knows the program's innards did the work in India and now cannot
be located, you will be in a very serious fix indeed. In a related
remark, Stephen McClellan writes that ``American computer customers
will for a long time undoubtedly have serious reservations about buying
vital computer products from a source 6000 miles away.''

footnote: Reference
cited earlier.

In the October 9, 1995 Wall Street Journal article mentioned in
a previous section, reports that William Schroeder, chief executive
officer at Diamond Multimedia Systems says ``There is a `natural
limit' to how many skilled jobs can be moved abroad because of the
costs of communication and other factors.''

In many senses, software plays just as vital a role in our economy
as does oil. Thus a dependence on imported software would be just
as risky as we have found our dependence on imported oil to be.

The most important point is that immigrants are not needed for the
success of our national computer industry: The industry has not
depended on immigrants for its technical edge. Most of the immigrants
in the industry have been of average technical abilities. The vast
majority of the major technical advances in the industry have been made
by U.S. natives. American universities are producing more domestic
graduates than the field needs (including both the computer industry
itself and ``application'' industries such as banks). Employer claims
that the graduate degrees or special skills of the foreign nationals are
needed for productivity are unwarranted.

In addition to not being a help to the industry, large-scale immigration has
arguably hurt both the industry and its workers: Hiring of foreign
nationals has led to both unemployment and underemployment of U.S. native
professionals, and has also contributed to rampant age discrimination in the
industry, by the industry's own admission. The presence of foreign nationals
has swelled the labor surplus, contributing to the counterproductive practice
of automated resume' scanning, and dissuading many of the brightest native
students from majoring in computer science; employers are shooting
themselves in the foot, often failing to hire the best talent.

Current skilled immigration policy amounts to a major financial
subsidy to the self-described free-marketeer Silicon Valley
employers. Many employers who hire foreign nationals, perhaps most,
are motivated by a desire to save money. Foreign nationals are
willing to take a lower salary in exchange for being sponsored for a
green card; young new graduates have lower salaries, and the foreign
nationals expand the pool of young workers; and employers who run out
of domestic workers possessing a given skill set can hire foreign
nationals with those skills, thus avoiding the expense of retraining.

Even Stanford University law professor Bill Ong Hing, a strident
immigrant-rights advocate, has criticized current policy on hiring of
foreign computer professionals as being unresponsive to various
societal needs.

footnote: Asian Week, April 29, 1994.

Universities across the country are spending hundreds of millions of
dollars to train students for the computer industry. Most people
would agree that this is a reasonable, even vital, investment in our
nation's future. But that investment will yield a return only if our
graduates are allowed to put their learning to use. Current
immigration policy--both for employment-based green cards and for
H-1B visas--is impeding that goal.

The following actions should be taken:

Sponsorship for immigration of genuinely outstanding scientists
and engineers should be continued. However, these people should be
clearly talented. For example, the mere co-authorship of research
papers should not by itself be evidence of talent.

The routine granting of green cards to foreign computer
professionals on the basis of graduate degrees or ``special skills''
should be ceased. Employment-based green cards should be granted only
if there is a shortage of people with
general skills.
In particular, employment-based green cards should be granted to
computer programmers only if there is a shortage of people with
general programming skills, not because there is a shortage of
programmers with five years of experience writing C++ code for
TCP/IP applications on SPARC computers.

The granting of H-1B temporary work visas to computer
professionals in foreign countries should be reformed along the
same lines. H-1B's should be issued only if there is a general
shortage of programmers, rather than a contrived shortage as
described above.

A. Cultural Impediments to Innovation and Insight Among the Immigrants

After hearing industry lobbyists emphasize that they hire foreign
nationals in order to get the world's ``best and brightest,'' many
people are quite surprised by the award statistics in Section 12.
Given that about one-third of Silicon Valley engineers and programmers
are foreign-born, for instance, how could there be so few top innovators
among them?

The answer to this question turns out to be cultural: Most of the
immigrants in the Silicon Valley are from East Asian cultures which
emphasize rote-memory learning, which stifles creativity. In this
appendix I will discuss the details of this, so that the relative lack
of immigrants in the innovation awards lists will make sense. In the
Silicon Valley the term immigrant is virtually synonymous with the
word Chinese, as the vast majority of immigrant professionals
there are ethnic Chinese. Indeed, the author's analysis of the 1990
Census data shows that of computer professionals in the Silicon Valley
who had immigrated in the five years prior to the Census, 76% were
Chinese.

footnote: This includes people from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Upon hearing this statistic in the Fall of 1995, some industry lobbyists
dismissed it as transitory, the result of the Chinese Student Protection
Act, which granted permanent residence to tens of thousands of Chinese
nationals. But this was incorrect; the act was passed in 1992 and was
not implemented until 1993, several years
after the
collection of the 1990 Census data which I have used here. In fact, as
noted earlier, the largest Chinese subgroup in the Silicon Valley
consists of those from Taiwan, not China, as the Taiwanese influx began
before those from China and Hong Kong.

Note also that the Chinese dominance among the foreign-born in the
industry is changing, in that in 1997 Indians outnumbered Chinese by a
5-to-1 ratio among holders of the H-1B work visa.

This has led to
immigration commentator Francis Fukuyama's claim that the computer
industry depends particularly on ethnic Chinese for its technical
edge.

footnote: National Review, May 1, 1995.

In other words,
a discussion of the quality of immigrant computer professionals is
largely a discussion of the quality of the Chinese. Thus I will spend
some time here discussing some Chinese cultural traits which, quite
counter to Fukuyama's claim that the Chinese bring the industry a
technical edge, actually tend to result in reduced levels of technical
abilities among the Chinese computer professionals, relative to those of
other groups.

On the plus side, the Confucian ethic produces diligent, compliant
attitudes which many employers value in their Chinese employees. However,
that same Confucian ethic actually tends to make those employees'
technical abilities weaker than those of other ethnicities, not
stronger. The rote-memory approach to learning in Chinese, Japanese
and other East Asian cultures

footnote: The comments on Asian
educational systems here of course do not apply to Americans of Asian
ancestry who are born (or at least raised) in the U.S.

tends to
produce workers who

are not innovative

are not good at problem solving

need excessive amounts of supervisory help

This is again reflected in the ACM awards for industrial innovation.
Of the 56 award winners, there are no foreign-born Chinese.

footnote: There
is one Chinese-American.

Similarly, in spite of the large numbers of Chinese foreign students
in U.S. computer science Ph.D. programs,

footnote: For example,
consider the 460 applications the UC Davis Computer Science
Department received for faculty positions (which of course require a
Ph.D.) in 1994-1995. Chinese (from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong)
comprised the largest ethnicity, with 84 applicants. The next-largest
group was Indians, with 60 applicants.

and in spite of the fact that
the Chinese students tend to have high Graduate Record Examination
scores and get good grades, of the 35 ACM awards for outstanding Ph.D.
dissertations, none of the recipients has been of Chinese
ethnicity.

footnote: By contrast, there are many papers in computer
science research journals by Chinese graduate students, co-authored
with their research professors. The student will be an author (typically
the first-listed author) even if the research professor, not the
student, was the main creative source for the project. This is very
different from the ACM dissertation awards, in which the research
professor must make the case that the ideas and insights in the
research came primarily from the student, not the professor.

Again,
virtually no jobs in the computing field require graduate work, but
the point is that this complete lack of Chinese winners of the
dissertation award sheds further light on the complete lack of
Chinese among the industrial innovation award recipients: the
rote-memory approach to learning--called tian yazi, ``stuff
the duck'' in Chinese--simply is not conducive to technical
innovation.

footnote: The data above are as of 1995. The year 1997
brought the first Chinese winner, Xiaoyuan Tu of the University
of Toronto.

(Some readers may wonder if the ACM is simply biased against Asians.
But this concern is quickly dismissed by noting that although there
have been no Chinese recipients of the ACM dissertation award,
five recipients of the awards have been from India. The overall
breakdown of recipients is: U.S. native 25; India 5; Europe and
Israel 5.)

Of the 89 computer-chip innovators discussed in the Malone reference
cited earlier, only one is Chinese. Of the 29 names cited by UC Davis
computer science and electrical engineering faculty, none is Chinese.

Physicst Chen Ning Yang at SUNY Stony Brook went into the problem in
great detail in his television interview with Bill Moyers (available in
book form in Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas, Doubleday, 1989):

``...kids trained in the Orient tend to be too [intellectually]
timid...This attitude prevents them from jumping over hurdles to make
important contributions. We see this very clearly among our graduate
students. The graduate students from the Orient are quieter and more
willing to work, and they make very good grades, but they are
somewhat restrained from making imaginative leaps...This too timid
attitude is a handicap later in life when they want to be more
creative or more imaginative...The Chinese system tends to channel
the students too much...You have blinders over your eyes...You're not
told to think for yourself...More than one graduate student from
China and Taiwan has come to me and said, `Professor Yang, I find it
very strange that I was the best in my class in examinations, but now
I'm doing research work, and I find that these American students are
much livelier, much better than I am.'"

It must be noted that Yang is speaking generally, not about individual
cases (he, of course, is an exception to his own rule). One of the most
insightful graduate students I have worked with, Raymond Wai-Man Lo,
was from Hong Kong. But Yang's general observations match those of
many educators, including me, who work with Asian students.

footnote: Yang
is not a fan of the Europeans either. He places European culture as
being halfway between the American and East Asian cultures, in terms
of developing the creative impulse.

Professor Benjamin Duke, who has taught at universities in Japan
for 25 years, notes the problem frequently in The Japanese School,
Praeger, 1986, such as in pp.204ff: ``Throughout Japan's modern
history she has made few original contributions in any endeavor
except for the Japanese arts...It is often pointed out [by Japanese]
that Japan has produced only four Nobel Prize winners compared to
126 awards to Americans and more than 200 to Europeans.'' A Japanese,
Hisao Yamada writes, ``Our [Japanese] children are drilled and our
school system is imbued with...uniformity...Deviation from the standard
is [barely allowed]. Creativity is punished.''

footnote: This is from
Yamada's article ``Breaking the Mold,'' in The Discipline of
Curiosity, Jenny Groen, Eefke Smit and Juurd Eijsvoogel, eds.,
Elsevier Science, 1990.

Yamada adds, alluding to the role
Confucian obedience to authority plays in this process, ``The
question `why' is not interpreted as a healthy sign of curiosity--it
is a personal offense toward the integrity of the teacher.''

This is important, because computer programming is inherently a
creative activity. If, say, we were to assign each of 10 programmers
to write a program to perform the same task, we would get 10 very
different programs.

Robert Glass describes the creative nature of programming in the
preface of his book Software Creativity (Prentice-Hall software
engineering series, 1995), writing from the perspective ``That software
construction is primarily a problem-solving activity; that all
problem-solving requires creativity; that software problem-solving
is deeply complex, perhaps more deeply complex than any other such
activity; that, therefore, software problem-solving requires the
ultimate in creativity.''

Thus lack of creativity in a programmer is a serious impediment to
his work. As a result, Japan's celebrated success in manufacturing
(automobiles, consumer electronics, memory chip production) has
not carried over to the software industry, which is a different
entity entirely. In The Coming Computer Industry Shakeout
(Wiley, 1984, p.120), Stephen McClellan writes, ``The Japanese are
trying. They are building software factories and employing thousands
of programmers. But that approach seems to lack the creative
dimension that software development requires. Japan's skills of
adaptation [shown in the manufacturing industries listed above] seem
to be of little help when it comes to software.'' This effort failed,
and Professor Edward Feigenbaum of the Stanford University Computer
Science Department and an expert on the Japanese computer industry
reports that, ``In January 1993, Tokyo officially declared software a
`distressed' industry.'' (The Future of Software, ed. by Derek
Leebaert, MIT Press, 1995, p.216.)

More recently, Anthony Clapes

footnote: Softwars, Quorum Books,
Westport, Connecticut, 1993.

, observed that, ``Creativity, in the
sense of individual expression, is said not to be valued in Japanese
society. Programming, however, is a form of self-expression.''
Clapes then recalls the famous Japanese proverb, ``The nail which
sticks out gets hammered down,'' and reports that ``Many commentators
have attributed the inability of Japan to achieve prominence in the
software industry to [this] notion.''

Such remarks were also made by Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris
in Computer Wars (Times Books, New York, 1993), who observed
that Japan's failure to make inroads in the computer industry has
come in spite of enormous efforts by the Japanese government to develop
that industry. The Taiwan government has also tried to develop a
``Chinese Silicon Valley'' in the city of Hsinchu, and again, other
than in manufacturing, the government efforts have not had much success.
Even Steve Hsieh, the director of the Taiwan government project, says
``We are extremely efficient manufacturers, and we are becoming good
developers. But we are not yet researchers.''

footnote: The
Economist, March 9, 1996.

As noted earlier, an absolutely key trait for success in the computer
professions is good problem-solving ability. Virtually all aspects
of software and hardware development are fundamentally acts of
problem solving. This is true not only for the initial development
stage, as in Robert Glass' remarks cited above, but also in
other aspects, particularly the debugging process.

Yet the rote-memory approach to learning in East Asian cultures
produce marked weakness in problem solving. This was noted by
Professor Duke, for instance in mathematics: ``Seldom does the
[Japanese] mathematics teacher go beyond the concepts required for
the [nationwide standardized] examination...the application of
mathematics to unique situations requiring imaginative or original
thinking is rare indeed.''

Similar comments comparing the problem-solving abilities of Hong Kong and
Canadian students appeared in the Financial Post (Canada),
November 5, 1994: ``Students coming from the Hong Kong system often
have trouble with the freer Canadian style of education. `They do
well in rote memory, but they don't have much experience in applying
what they learn,' [school principal] Gillies says. `Canadian children
are better problem-solvers.'"

Esther Lee Yao, a Chinese-American professor of education, writes
that Asian immigrant children ``work efficiently in a well-structured,
quiet learning environment in which definite goals have been
established for them. They seldom...dare to challenge their
instructors...Older children, who are accustomed to structured and
passive learning conditions, rather than the American educational
approach, which requires critical and divergent thinking, may perform
well in rote memorization and mathematics operations but may do poorly
in creative writing and analytical commentary.''

The reader may wonder how this jibes with the fact that in the last
10 years, a number of winners of the high school-level Westinghouse
Science Talent Search have been Chinese immigrants. Although we must
indeed praise these kids for their ambition and dedication, the
fact is that the contest is not a measure of ``the best and the
brightest'' of high school science students. Instead, the contest
has become more a matter of going to the right high school, and
arranging for the right university professor for guidance.

Out of thousands of high schools across the nation, the same
four or five high schools dominate the list of winners every year.
These schools offer special three-year ``Westinghouse programs,'' and
have honed strategy for winning the contest ``down to a science'' (pun
intended). And the student projects which form the main criterion
for the award are far from being independent work; instead, they
are done under the direction of well-chosen university researchers.
(See for instance Newsday, January 24, 1994, and Newsday,
March 13, 1991.)

The San Francisco Bay Area, where there are no high schools with
``Westinghouse programs,'' usually does not produce students
(Chinese or otherwise) who do well in the Westinghouse contest, in
spite of the fact that the region contains large numbers of
professional, middle-class Chinese immigrant parents, many of them
engineers in the Silicon Valley.

In addition, the Confucian respect for authority and the rote-memory
approach to learning impedes independent thinking. Supervisors in both
industry and academia have told me that they feel that a disproportionate
number of Chinese need to be given excessively detailed directions in
their work, and are not self-starters.

It is significant that the general consensus within the company where
Ms. Yee works is that of the company's several sites, the most
productive one is located in a state with few immigrant engineers,
while the least productive sites have many immigrants. This may
partly explain the DeMarco and Lister finding in their book
Peopleware that programmers who work together tend to be of similar
talents, either similarly low or similarly high.

These problems have been so great that the South Korean government has
recently been working on completely overhauling its educational system,
according to Woo Sung Han of the Korea Times. Such an overhaul
has also been reported by 60 Minutes in the case of Japan, and
some work in that direction has been done in China as
well.

footnote: Writing in the March 9, 1997 issue of the San Jose
Mercury News, J. Myron Atkin reported, ``While each country is fighting
its own demons as it tries to improve its schools, it may be
particularly instructive to look at what disturbs the Japanese [about
education] and what they are trying to do about it... countries that
serves as the president's model. The Japanese are deeply concerned with
what they see as a lack of creativity in their society and with the
deteriorating quality of their physical environment. Both issues lead to
much hand-wringing in the public press and among educational
policymakers.''

Professor Harold Stevenson of the University of Michigan, who has made
some classroom visits to some East Asian schools, believes that such an
overhaul is unnecessary, dismissing the rote-memory image of East Asian
education as something that ``was going on in Asian classrooms 50 years
ago.'' But this does not jibe with the experiences of those who
actually teach Asian students, as we have seen above, nor does it jibe
with the East Asian governments' own findings which have led to their
educational overhauls. One of the problems here may be that the
teachers whose classrooms Stevenson visited (and those visited in a 1996
OECD study) were making special efforts to look ``modern'' for him,
especially since government efforts at overhaul had already begun.

It
remains to be seen what the effects of this will be 15 or 20 years from
now. Since the major problems are rooted in Confucian culture rather
than in the educational system itself, change in student attitudes may
be difficult to achieve.

Footnotes:

1 The views expressed here are those of the author, not the
University of California.